The Ins and Outs of the Jains in Tamil Literary Histories

J Indian Philos (2011) 39:599–646 DOI 10.1007/s10781-011-9125-0

Christoph Emmrich

Published online: 19 April 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract The Jains and their texts play a key role in the literary histories of the Tamil-speaking region. However, in their modern form, dating from 1856 to the present, these histories have been written almost exclusively by non-Jains. Driving their efforts have been agendas such as cultural evolutionism, Dravidian nationalism or S´aiva devotionalism. This essay builds on ideas articulated by the contemporary Tamil theorist K. Civatampi, examining how various models of periodization have frozen the Jains in the ancient past. Further, it will explore how this unfolding historical drama, which gloriously climaxes in Tamil literature, has attributed the Jains, as dramatis personae, merely a role in early Jain texts; their role as communities transmitting these texts has been ignored. In contrast to this typical pattern, this article will also introduce a literary history written in 1941 by the Jain A. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r (1880–1960). It will explore whether or not his voice, which emerged from within the same academic community contributing to the strange absence of Jains in the contemporary awareness of Tamil literary, was successful in ﬁnding another way for Jains of being heard, and for non-Jains, of listening.

Keywords Cakravarti Á Tamil literature Á Historiography Á Jains

Introduction

The origin of modern studies on Tamil literary history was recently described as having occurred in the 1880s through the ‘‘discovery’’ of a Tamil text, the Cı¯vakacinta¯man: i (Swaminathaiyar 1907), which was subsequently edited and translated by U. Ve¯. Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar (1855–1942). This text had not been previously

C. Emmrich (&) Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, 170 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5R 2M8, Canada e-mail: [email protected] 123 600 C. Emmrich known to ‘‘Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar and others whose literary education was shaped by late-medieval Hindu culture,’’ but supposedly it was ‘‘revered and actively studied’’ by the Jains of the Tamil-speaking region. Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar ‘‘sought [these] out and cultivated relationships with’’ them, and with their help he familiarized himself with 1 the text. The Cı¯vakacinta¯man: i was the first of a vast number of texts that were examined and worked on in the following decades, in what was to be called the ‘‘Tamil Renaissance’’. The field of what could now be called ‘‘Tamil literature’’ (tamil ilakkiyam) expanded thereby dramatically, these texts forming the basis upon which writing a ‘‘history’’ (varala¯-ru) of Tamil literature became a cultural project of paramount importance. But as so often with narratives concerning origin, upon closer look this one, too, seems to have had a transparent strategy. Older historical relationships are loosened by the drama of the new2 and lost within it, and topoi and old roles are reformulated. An example, to mention only one of the many we shall encounter in this short study, is the selflessly resourceful and procuring Jain who helps the earnestly seeking Tamil realize his under-acknowledged greatness. Dis- regarding whether this is true or not, I will take this little story as a starting point to examine how the Tamil Jain was given this role, as well as several others, in the process of Tamil literary history being written, and how, in turn, this may have influenced how the Tamil Jains were understood. And reversing this narrative, without attempting to make it more true that way, I would also like to examine how the story might have unfolded if it had been recorded how the Jain felt to have works he may or may not have been familiar with, may or may not have considered ‘‘his own’’, ‘‘discovered’’ by a modernizing Tamil elite, who attributed these works to the Jain community, and yet appropriated them in the effort of ‘‘extending the horizon of the Tamil literary past’’ (Cutler 2003, p. 272). How would a Jain have understood his role in that moment, the birth of Tamil literary history, and how would he have come to terms with the dramatic development of the academic genre in the hands of authors who had various private agendas? Is there reason to suspect that the history of modern Tamil literary historiography, from its beginning, whenever that was, was marked by non-Jains progressively writing the Jains out of Tamil literary history? And did their exclusion become more noticeable and comprehensive, the more sophisticated and thorough the mechanisms for including them became? Giving them the complex roles to be explored in this study, roles, which were not theirs to chose or reject created the semblance of their inclusion while

1 This is discussed by Norman Cutler (2003, pp. 272–275) on the basis of Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar’s 1958 autobiography En-- Carittiram. For bibliographic details, see Cutler (2003, p. 272, n. 3). For the most recent re-evaluation of Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar’s autobiography, see Monius (forthcoming), in this journal issue. 2 That the text must have been part of a much older informal Tamil literary canon is proven by the fact that as early as 1868, a section of it was commented upon and translated into English by H. Bower and Muttaiya¯p Pil:l:ai. Also there were several plans for an edition of the work (by G.U. Pope, W.H. Drew, ¯ A-rumuka Na¯valar and Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar’s teacher Mı¯n-- a¯t:cicuntaram Pil:l:ai), although none of these cases materialized (Zvelebil 1995, pp. 170–171). Ca¯mina¯ta Te¯cikar’s early eighteenth century invective against a whole range of Jain (and Buddhist) works, including the Cı¯vakacinta¯man: i and the Cilappatika¯ram (Zvelebil 1992, p. 147), would only make sense if already at that time these works were regarded highly, at least by some scholars. This could, of course, also suggest that in that historical context, the status of these later canonized works was at least somewhat ambiguous and contestable, or possibly represented the projection of an alternative, ‘‘negative’’ or ‘‘other’’ canon. 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 601 excluding them as the agents of their own history. There are many reasons for such suspicions. These include attempts, even if well-meaning, to attribute ancient, un-dateable texts to the Jains (their ill-defined nature allowing attributions to be more freely made), the omission of entire literary genres from historical accounts (such as, above all, the Jain commentarial tradition), the complete absence of any reference to Jain literature that was written after the seventeenth century, and the overwhelming chorus of non-Jain voices when it comes to writing about Jain literature in Tamil. I would like to map the position of the Jains in the writings on the history of literature in Tamil3 and shall do so in three steps: First, by investigating the role played in Tamil literary histories by Jains, Jain authors, Jain texts, Jain institutions and, most crucially, ‘‘Jainism.’’ I will do this by looking at where Jains have been placed in time, as well as how their role in textual transmission is described. I will refer thereby to the first Tamil author to have analyzed the development of the ‘‘history of literature’’ or ‘‘literary history’’ in Tamil, Ka¯rtike¯cu Civatampi, with his 1986 Literary History in Tamil (Sivathamby 1986), and will try to expand on his ideas. Secondly, I will examine the roles attributed to the Jains within these narratives: what the Jain looks like when he appears as an actor on the stage of Tamil literature, and what story he is called on to tell. For this I am indebted to Stuart Blackburn and his article, published in 2000, ‘‘Corruption and Redemption. The Legend of Valluvar and Tamil Literary History,’’ in which he analyzes how the ‘‘outsider,’’ in this case the Paraiyar, the Untouchable, is utilized to tell a particular kind of literary history (Blackburn 2000). In these first two steps, the focus is on non-Jain Tamil literary historians and their view of the Jains. Then, in a third step, I will take the opposite perspective and look at a particular history of literature in Tamil written by the twentieth century Jain scholar Appaca¯mi Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r. His Jaina Literature in Tamil, published in 1941 and revised and reprinted in 1974 (Chakravarti 1974), examines Tamil literature from a Jain perspective, focusing exclusively on Jain works in Tamil, their authors and supporting institutions.4 He sees Tamil literary works as part of a larger Jain literary culture, as documents attesting the degree to which the Tamils, unknowingly, have taken part in the wider world of Jain culture.

3 In the readings done for this study, I have constantly come across a group holding a very similar position to that of the Jains, namely, the Buddhists. Many of the issues raised in this paper regarding the Jains could also be raised for the Buddhists in the same way. Nevertheless, there are crucial differences in how the two groups have been seen historically, as well as in medieval literature and in modern scholarship (on this, see Monius 2004a, b). Although elaborating this contrast would clarify the Jain position further, I have decided not to include this aspect here. This may be somewhat justiﬁed by the fact that my primary scholarly interest lies in living Tamil Digambara Jain communities, including their texts and histories. There is, however, no Buddhist counterpart in contemporary Tamil Nadu. Nonetheless, con- trasting the role of the Jains not only with that of the Buddhists, but also that of the Vais:n: avas (on this, see the article by Srilata Raman in this issue) would be a step to better understanding the historiographical practice of ‘‘positioning’’ various groups in Tamil literature, and perhaps even more generally in that of South Asia at large. 4 An early document, early in the sense of the colonial encounter with the Jains, in which the Jain perspective is presented is L. de Millone’s ‘‘Essai sur le jainisme par un jain’’, translated from Tamil by E.S.W. Senathi Raja and published in 1885 (de Millone and Senati Raja 1885). It would be worthwhile to look at it again, although this would go beyond the framework of this article. 123 602 C. Emmrich

The Jain Text as a Period Piece

Ka¯rtike¯cu Civatampi’s Literary History in Tamil is the first work to reflect on the political agendas that may or should lie behind a Tamil literary historiography. He discusses how it is possible to identify such agendas by means of the way the history of a literature is told, and how we ourselves can write historically about literature in a manner that is aware of and responsible for our intention to bring about historical changes. In short, he examines how writing about literature is both historical and political (e.g. Sivathamby 1986, pp. 1–3, 105–106, 110). As he points out, there is a difference between a ‘‘history of literature’’ and a ‘‘literary history.’’ A history of literature is a history only of texts, whereas literary history is one of social events, agents and circumstances, as analyzed on the basis of texts. Here there is room for self-reflectively addressing the issues raised above, particularly the interplay of literature and history in a world defined primarily as social, and through an interest that is, above all, humanistic (Sivathamby 1986, pp. 1–10). In this sense, ‘‘a good history of literature is a pre-requisite for an adequate literary history’’ (Sivathamby 1986, p. 2). Civatampi’s own account of literary history in Tamil is twofold. First, he writes a new literary history according to his model, reexamining the texts that previous histories of literature have mapped out through the ages, suggesting a new periodization, commenting on the social and political conditions for their composition, as well as, on the meta-level, the mutual influence between the social and the political, on one hand, and the perception of what literature is, on the other (Sivathamby 1986, pp. 21–45). This leads Civatampi to examine, in a second step, how the history of literature, and to a certain degree, literary histories, have been written so far, what their pre-modern antecedents were, and what happened when modern academic historical writing on literature emerged. He guides us through the shifting political agendas of the past and up to the present day, presenting then his own project (Sivathamby 1986, pp. 46–87), which maps out the current deficits and challenges in Tamil literary historiography, as well as possible reorientations thereof (Sivathamby 1986, pp. 89–106). One of Civatampi’s many insightful remarks on literary historiography, and one that is critical for our study, is that the nationalist project of Tamil literary history is a narrative dominated by, if not even reduced to, a single religion and a single language, i.e. Sáivism and Tamil, and that a future historiography should relativize that role. There are a number of steps to be taken in order to better understand the function Tamil literary histories have had until now, and how they might be written differently. These include examining how texts attributed to Jains are used in literary histories, how they are identified as such, what position they are given, what they are expected to do, and what this means for who the Jains are understood to be. We will thus first identify the historical point in time that has been allocated to the historiographical entity ‘‘Jain,’’ be this entity understood as text, practice or doctrine, as author or community, or indiscriminately all at once. Only in a second step will we try to determine how these individual

123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 603 elements have, in different ways, been used to shape the entity called Jain, making it appear this way or that depending on the story the historian set out to tell.5 In all historical writing on literature, the practice of ‘‘periodization’’ seems particularly crucial (Civatampi dedicates his last chapter [Sivathamby 1986, pp. 107–135] to criticizing it, although he indulged in that very practice in the second). Periodization in literary history was a major part of literary theories of the second half of the twentieth century (e.g. Wellek and Warren 1962), but in recent decades has undergone an equally strong critique as well as a radical re-evaluation of its relative heuristic value.6 In the sense of Foucault’s dictum, ‘‘Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’’ (Foucault 1977, p. 154, quoted in Brown 2001, p. 309), periodization involves the division of an imagined chronological series of events into a series of units of varying duration called ‘‘periods’’. This is done by inserting markers, i.e. dates, identifying the beginning and the end of a certain section of time on the basis of certain criteria, which find expression in the names that are given to the sections thus created. These names or dates are but ‘‘occult names’’ (Brown 2001, p. 313). They are distinct, but usually refer to each other more or less consistently and hence, form a more or less coherent style of organizing a continuous flow of texts, authors, media or events. They are a jargon, a terminology; they are part of an ideology and, tied to the practice of ‘‘emplotment’’ that develops a certain narrative, a certain story, a certain plot. This story describes how things came about, and often includes heroic protagonists, villains and allies, climactic and anti-climactic developments, as well as defeat and victory. In the process, it presents a particular view, which is more or less coherent, of the current state of affairs, which is the outcome, sometimes provisional, of that story. Addi- tionally, the story is usually ‘‘a story of everything,’’ a story of everything that it is ‘‘a history of,’’ and thus claims to cover comprehensively the data chosen and available so far. All this is guided by an agenda of how the past should be read and why; it is an agenda that includes which misreadings should be redressed, and how the political situation that literary historians find themselves part of or directly involved in is to be addressed. In our case, the history under consideration is the literary production in Tamil or in the Tamil speaking region, and hence, the testimonies of that world. In Tamil, periodization has been characteristic of this genre of academic writing since the encounter and exchange of Tamil and European scholars from the middle of the

5 Most of the present study will concentrate on the role of religion, hereby consciously leaving the question of language unaddressed, despite its being equally crucial and intricately connected to the former. In fact, Civatampi points out that for a ‘‘literary history’’ of Tamil society, it would be just as important to include literature in languages other than Tamil, such as Sanskrit, Man: iprava¯l:am, Sáurasenı¯ and even Kannada, to mention only those relevant for the Jains. In order to focus on the area contended by Tamil literary historians, we will here reduce our scope to the literature that has been dealt with in literary histories until now, i.e. literature in Tamil, which may or may not include the literature in Man: iprava¯l:am. 6 Perkins has shown how the fate of periodization, particularly its crisis in post-modernity, is broadly linked to questions of how ‘‘literary history’’ should be done, or even whether it should be done at all (or whether one should rather return to more encyclopaedic forms of writing). He writes that ‘‘we require the concept of a unified period in order to deny it, and thus make apparent the particularity, local difference, heterogeneity, fluctuation, discontinuity, and strife that are now our preferred categories for understanding any moment of the past’’ (Perkins 1992, p. 64). 123 604 C. Emmrich nineteenth century onwards. Due to its continuity and popularity, it has become an ideal means for writing on literature. It is also well suited to the modern Tamil formulation of the role of the Jains within that history. However, a related question might be whether the Jain emerges (or is submerged) differently in accounts that either do without this mode, or are less consistent in applying it. How Jains have figured in periodization efforts is an expression of a political attitude towards what they represent within the comprehensive narrative of Tamil literature, as well as the position or time frame they have been assigned to within the periodizing practices of divide and rule (Berman 2001). In this section, our main questions will be: How are texts written by Jains strung together through time or divided? And then, as we shall see, why are they decisively ended, cut off in particular from the modern period? In the following, we will examine select literary histories spanning more than a century and a half, from 1856 to 2002. This will build and expand on a passage in which Civatampi asks what agendas might lie behind specific forms of periodization (Sivathamby 1986, pp. 108–109), and will also consider his monograph’s extremely useful Appendix VII.7 Most of these literary histories follow periodization as their main organizing principle, although some, particularly those very recent and very old, follow other organizational structures.8 I will start by briefly going back to the piece by Norman Cutler referred to at the beginning of this article, his 2003 ‘‘Three Moments in the Genealogy of Tamil Literary Culture’’. Cutler describes here what he calls ‘‘three key moments’’ in this genealogy: the autobiography of Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar, histories on Tamil literature written in the twentieth century, and a fifteenth century anthology called Pur- attirat::tu. Here, as Cutler specifically states, the aim ‘‘is to illuminate three historically located perspectives on Tamil Literature, rather than offer an omniscient master narrative’’ (Cutler 2003, p. 271). With regard to the temporal metaphoric language used for writing about literature, here the ‘‘moment’’ has replaced the ‘‘period.’’ However, it may be more than a stylistic or organizational coincidence that Cutler’s three moments fall within some of the most persistent ‘‘ages’’ or ‘‘time periods’’ found in

7 Sivathamby (1986, pp. 176–192). It is important to point out that Civatampi was not the first to do this: Kamil Zvelebil, in his Tamil Literature (Zvelebil 1975, pp. 28–33) and Companion Studies in the History of Tamil (Zvelebil 1992, pp. 12–17) offered a similar overview that we will refer to below. As far back as 1914, M. S´rı¯niva¯ca Aiyanka_ ¯r, in his Tamil Studies, and nearly a decade later in 1922, M.S. Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r, in his Studies in South Indian Jainism, both contrast periodization models. They also point out the importance of questioning the scientific soundness of periodization efforts with regard to Tamil literature on the whole, as well as looking critically at what periodization does to our understanding of literature in Tamil in general, and of Tamil Jainism in particular (Srinivasa Aiyangar 1986, pp. 198–212; Ramaswami Ayyangar 1922, pp. 83–89). I will discuss Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r’s contribution in detail and its relationship to Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s work below. For now, I have taken Civatampi’s more comprehensive synopsis as well as S´rı¯niva¯ca Aiyanka_ ¯r’s and Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r’s invectives as starting points and inspiration in my attempt to sort out the different models behind periodization efforts according to how they deal with Jain texts or omit them. 8 An aspect that is central to the efforts of most Western academic historiography in general, as well as to Tamil literary history in particular, is dating. Determining that a particular work is older, more recent or contemporaneous with another reflects as much of a political agenda as does periodization. An important issue where dates would be crucial is the question of synchronizing the period of the so-called Kala¯bhra interregnum with the production of Jain literature. However, I have decided not to discuss this matter here. As we shall see, the form of Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s Jaina Literature in Tamil makes dating secondary to the issues discussed here. 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 605

Tamil literary history. Apart from the otherwise promising shift in terminology from ‘‘histories’’ to ‘‘genealogies’’ and ‘‘master narrative’’ to ‘‘perspectives,’’ from terms that unify to those that fragment, there are three problems inherent in this approach: (a) It places enormous explicative pressure on isolated events, without (b) making the criteria on the basis of which they were chosen clear, and (c) leaves methodically under-focused the very history of what was posited as being the Urstiftung.9 For such an approach to be useful, its explanative reach must be demonstrated. This is most important for the question at hand. The genealogical relevance and influence of a particular moment must be developed by showing everything that was spawned by that moment. However, the tendency is to ignore what is not historically reducible to that moment, and, more generally, to all that did not happen.10 Prior to Civatampi’s meta-historiographical considerations and Cutler’s genealogical angle, Tamil literary historiography was indeed largely made up of master narratives. These are dominated by periodization models. Such models supply a number of criteria to determine the makeup of a period and how a series of periods are to be constituted. As we shall see, the most popular models are those defining periods by association with (1) a certain political rule, (2) one of the three qualifiers early/middle/late (which are closely related to the triad ancient/medieval/modern, but more flexibly applicable), (3) a particular genre, or (4) a particular religion. Most of the literary histories being examined here use more than one model, inte- grating them at various levels of their structural organization, prominently so in their division into chapters. Connected to the decision regarding which model (or models) to use is which kind of emplotment to opt for. What kind of story is the

9 One might consider the term ‘‘moment’’ to be a postmodern recurrence of the early twentieth-century Sternstunde, the temporally minute, yet consequential constellation popularized by Stefan Zweig’s Sternstunden der Menschheit, which is associated with the appearance of extraordinary individuals who ‘‘decide’’ history: ‘‘Solche dramatisch geballten, solche schicksalstra¨chtigen Stunden, in denen eine zeitu¨berdauernde Entscheidung auf ein einziges Datum, eine einzige Stunde und oft nur eine Minute zusammengedra¨ngt ist, sind selten im Leben eines Einzelnen und selten im Laufe der Geschichte. [...] Ich habe sie so genannt, weil sie leuchtend und unwandelbar wie Sterne die Nacht der Verga¨nglichkeit u¨bergla¨nzen.’’ (Zweig 1970, p. 7). The use of the term ‘‘moment’’ for key narrative events by Sheldon Pollock in The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, a book which proposes a strongly voluntaristic model to explain the historical rise and fall of languages in South Asia based on acts of deciding for or against their use, or their disuse (e.g. Pollock 2006, p. 1, 499), would be consistent with this surprising return of ‘‘decisions’’ in this early twenty-first-century literary historical paradigm. 10 Though it claims ‘‘to establish a framework that can be used to extend the present exploration to other moments in the genealogy of Tamil literary culture,’’ (Cutler 2003, p. 271) it is not clear how this can be done. This is especially the case if it does not allow the possibility of questioning the validity of the choice of these moments, or does not admit that such a framework may have been in place from the outset, when the choices were made. Among these choices is the complicity in the persistent belief that Jain literature is good because it is good for something. That something is usually defined as ‘‘Tamil,’’ i.e. connected to the larger Tamil cause, whatever that may be. As we shall see, in other discourses the Jains are good for turning Tamils from primitives into moral human beings, or to, ex negativo, help the Sáivas rediscover their Sáivism. In Cutler’s tale, which ostensibly follows Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar, the value of the Jains lies in their having written texts that, when discovered, have enabled the Tamils to discover their literary past and in addition, enable us to write the genealogy of Tamil literary culture. Thus, it should come as no surprise that in Cutler’s perspective, the Jains again fail to play a role in their own right. Rather than develop the potential for understanding a master narrative, the ‘‘three moments’’ approach seems to be an attempt to preclude the possibility of determining how much such a narrative may indeed be indebted to the Jains. 123 606 C. Emmrich literary history designed to tell, and what is that story supposed to tell us? Greatness lost and regained, or maintained throughout, tragic dissolution or the promise of emancipation? And what are the respective lessons to be learnt from this? What discernible qualities punctuate, mark, narrate, or dramatize the plot? How are these incorporated into certain sections of its development or its periods, as if to mark the plot’s driving forces, its alternating protagonists and agents? How is this material organized so that it tells the reader where the story is heading? And finally, how do the protagonists, both the supporting actors and those who never made it into the story, relate to those who may or may not be hearing it? These are questions that must be asked if one is to discover what a certain model does with and to the Jains. This is related to the position a particular author has taken, the impact of what they have written, and again, what that means for the Jains. And this must be seen in the light of who reads these histories, who does not, and who perhaps decides to respond. The literary histories of the 1960s are particularly eclectic in the use of models and periodization criteria. C. and Hepsipa¯Je¯cuta¯can-- ’s 1961 A History of Tamil Literature, stretches from a first period, called rather obviously ‘‘I. The Beginnings,’’11 and a last one called ‘‘The Modern Period.’’ The periods in between (a term that is also inter- changed with ‘‘age’’ or ‘‘movement’’) are variously named after a certain corpus of literature (e.g. ‘‘II. The Sangam Period [AD 150–250]’’ or ‘‘III. The Post-Sangam Period [AD 250–600]’’), after a term used in the history of religions (‘‘IV. The Bhakti Movement [AD 600–900]’’), or after a particular genre (‘‘V. The Age of the Epics [900–1200]’’) (Jesudasan and Jesudasan 1961, table of contents). What is peculiar, however, and what connects the Je¯cuta¯can-- s with other more recent literary historians is that they also include dramatic narrative terms to define periods. Examples of this are ‘‘VI. The Decadent Period (AD 1200–1650),’’ marked by the Pura¯n: ic and the cittar literature, or the next chapter, ‘‘VII. The Period of Transition (AD 1650–1800),’’ which is an uneasy fit of a period featuring Christian, Muslim and English influences leading up to modernity (Jesudasan and Jesudasan 1961, pp. 202–231, 232–248), a period that presupposes developmental models of transformation involving rise and fall. Finally, non-descript phases are reduced to the function of facilitating the passage from one period to the other. The Je¯suta¯can-- s are joined in their style by authors such as Carve¯palli Ra¯makirus:n: an, with his 1962 Tamil ilakkiya varala¯-ru, where the period from 850 to 1200 CE (which roughly coincides with the Je¯suta¯can-- s’ ‘‘The Age of the Epics’’ that precedes ‘‘The Decadent Period’’) is called ‘‘the Great Age’’ (uyarnta ka¯lam) (Ramakrishnan 1962, table of contents). Another such author is N. Cupira- man: iyan-- , who in his 1981 An Introduction to Tamil Literature talks of an ‘‘Age of Consolidation and Integration,’’ which covers the seventeenth to nineteenth century, followed by an ‘‘Age of Experimentation and Transition’’ covering the nineteenth century (Subramanian 1981, table of contents). The most striking feature about this

11 Here and throughout, I use capitals indicating that these terms are functioning mainly, and sometimes exclusively, as chapter titles. In several cases when dealing with periodizing frameworks, I have preferred to refer directly to the table of contents of the work in question, rather than to the first pages of the individual chapters, since in my view both the narrative model and the structure of a work are visualized more easily by these overviews. It is not uncommon for the contents pages to fall outside the pagination, whether in Roman or Arabic numerals, in which case I simply refer to ‘‘table of contents.’’ 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 607 more recent type of history is that there is a tendency to move away from identifying certain periods with certain events, be they political rules, religious movements, or literary genres, preferring rather totalizing developmental perspectives. This contrast can be seen more clearly as we move back in time. It thus comes as no surprise that, other than in discussions of individual works and their contexts, the history of Jain literature, as such, does not play a role. Similar things already seem to have started to happen in 1951, when V. Celvana¯yakam, with his Tamil ilakkiya varala¯-ru, followed in 1965 by T.P. Mı¯n-- a¯t:cicuntaram’s A History of Tamil Literature (Meenakshisundaram 1965, table of contents), proposed a extremely successful model of periodization of literature that, apart from Cankam_ literature, is entirely organized around criteria having to do with political rule (i.e. dynastic, colonial): ‘‘the time of the Pallavas’’ (pallavar ka¯lam) is followed by ‘‘the time of the Co¯las’’ (co¯lar ka¯lam), that by ‘‘the time of the Na¯yakas’’ (na¯yakar ka¯lam), concluding with ‘‘the European time’’ (airo¯ppiyar ka¯lam) (Celvana¯yakam 1951, pp. vii–viii). Like more recent models, both religions and genre are avoided as criteria; it is political power and the work of the historian proper, not the literatus, which defines along which vector literature is moving, stopping or changing. In Celvana¯yakam’s picture, the Jains flourished during the time of the decadence of Cankam_ literature (cankam_ maruviya ka¯lam). They vacate the historical stage just in time for the first dynastically-named historical period, named after the reign of the Pallavas (Celvana¯yakam 1951, pp. 98–101). These literary histories lose interest in the Jains as soon as the potentates lose theirs. There is no way to determine the internal religious vectors of literary transmission. What remains are individual literary works that fall within one or the other period of rule and that may or may not be attributed to Jain authors.12 In comparison to historical works proper, conspicuously less explicit in literary histories is the link between the Jains and an epigraphically poorly-documented historical period called the ‘‘Kala¯bhra Interreg- num,’’ generally placed between the third and the sixth centuries. In this period ‘‘a mysterious and ubiquitous enemy of civilization, the evil rulers called Kalabhras (Kalappa¯l:ar) [came] and upset the established order.’’ It was ‘‘a dark period marked by the ascendancy of Buddhism, and probably also of Jainism,’’ which at the same time ‘‘was characterized also by great literary activity in Tamil,’’ as ‘‘[m]any of the authors were votaries of the ‘heretical’ sects’’ (Nilakanta Shastri 1966, pp. 144–145; see also Arunachalan 1979). In this highly dramatic and ambivalent narrative, the Jains (at least ‘‘probably also’’) find themselves in the awkward position of being responsible for ‘‘great literary activity’’ that, however, was enabled by an ‘‘enemy of civilization.’’ The difficulty in synchronizing the little datable evidence of this period with literary documents13 makes the challenge of proving the connection between the political, the literary and the religious obviously speculative and free for ideological appropriation. Where, in my eyes, both the hard-core historical and the more recent developmental narratives find their common ground is in a much earlier, and actually very

12 For Civatampi’s criticism of this model, as it affects his own proposed model the most, see Siv- athamby (1986, pp. 111–112). 13 One example is Vaiya¯puri Pil:l:ai’s late dating of some of works attributed to Jain and Buddhist authors, moving them out of the Kala¯bhra period (Vaiyapuripillai 1988, pp. 98–99, 109, 114–117). 123 608 C. Emmrich old, modern model: that of the periodization based on the triad ‘‘ancient, medieval and modern’’ or ‘‘early, middle and late.’’ Kamil Zvelebil cites Vi.Ko¯. Cu¯riyana¯ra¯yan: aCa¯stiri (1870–1903) as having been the first to propose this model for Tamil literature (Zvelebil 1975, p. 29). This model is followed by A. Citamparana¯ta Cet::tiya¯r in his 1958 ‘‘Introduction to Tamil Poetry’’ (Chettiar 1958) and has continued to dominate literary histories, from Mu¯.Va¯ratara¯can-- ’s 1972 Tamil ilakkiya varala¯ru (Varadarajan 1972, table of contents) and G. Te¯vane¯yan ‘Pa¯vanar’’s 1979 - 14 15 -- Tamil ilakkiya varala¯-ru, to Kamil Zvelebil himself. In Zvelebil’s first comprehensive attempt of this kind, his article ‘‘Tentative Periodization of the Devel- opment of Tamil’’ (Zvelebil 1957), he renames the periods that others called ancient, medieval and modern as ‘‘old’’ (till sixth/seventh century), ‘‘middle’’ (sixth/seventh to seventeenth/eighteenth century) and ‘‘new’’ (1750/1800–to date), and uses historical linguistic criteria of the development of the Tamil language to periodize its literature. Zvelebil reaffirmed this model, quoting Cet::tiya¯r as the author he decides to follow, in his 1975 Tamil Literature.16 If one views this model as applied to language development, at a certain point in time, literature which may or may not have a Jain background figures as one of many expressions of Tamil, but as soon as works that are presumably Jain disappear from the mainstream, they are no longer useful for defining the timing of Tamil and simply do not figure.17 Though Zvelebil’s use of this model may go back to historical linguistics, its theoretical justification as defined in Tamil Literature turns out to be much more differentiated. Rather than discussing them, here he briefly refers to and comments upon a whole range of periodization proposals.18 Following Wellek and Warren’s 1949 Theory of Literature (Wellek and Warren 1962), Zvelebil discards any periodization criteria that are not ‘‘established primarily by literary criteria, with reference to systems of literary norms, standards and conventions’’ (Zvelebil 1975, p. 30; Zvelebil 1993, p. 12), such as those that are ‘‘nominalistic,’’ i.e. view any attempt at periodization as mere convention without any grounding in data, or ‘‘mainly religious’’ (Zvelebil 1992, p. 14), or, as he also describes them, either ‘‘ideological’’ (Zvelebil 1992,

14 Devaneyan (1979), table of contents. 15 Zvelebil, as we shall see, is on record for having written a number of literary histories with very different models of periodization. These are based either on early/middle/late, on genres or on religion. 16 Zvelebil (1975, pp. 31–33) repeated in his 1992 Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature (Zvelebil 1992, p. 12, 16–17), which is a partial reworking of the section on periodization in Zvelebil (1975). 17 Thomas Lehmann follows this model in his survey of classical Tamil commentarial literature, where religious commentaries (camaya nu¯l urai) are either S´rı¯vais:n: ava or Caivacitta¯nta (Lehmann 2009, pp. 55– 58). There is nothing in his survey to suggest that there was a Jain commentarial literature in Tamil (or Man: iprava¯l:am) at all. 18 When mentioning others in Tamil Literature, starting with Ta¯mo¯taram Pil:l:ai and Cu¯riyana¯ra¯yan: a Ca¯stiri and ending with Pu¯rn: alinkam_ Pil:l:ai and A¯ .Ve¯lu Pil:l:ai, Zvelebil’s comments limit themselves to and range from ‘‘may be summarily dismissed as impossible’’ (referring to Ta¯mo¯taram Pil:l:ai) to ‘‘in fact the scheme presents no periodization’’ (referring to R. Caldwell). And while he seems to be more generous in his reworked version in the 1992 Companion Studies, with comments such as ‘‘could be to a great degree accepted’’ (referring to Pu¯rn: alinkam_ Pil:l:ai) (Zvelebil 1993, pp. 13–14), neither overview adds much to the discussion. Cutler’s discussion, though it concentrates on comparing Mu.Ci. Pu¯rn: alinkam_ Pil:l:ai and Es. Vaiya¯puri Pil:l:ai, is far more differentiated and powerful, as it historically contextualizes their models in the same manner as Civatampi had done (Cutler 2003, pp. 288–292). 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 609 p. 13) or ‘‘metaphysical’’ (Zvelebil 1992, p. 15). It remains unclear, however, how this justifies the ancient/medieval/modern model. It is also rather inconsistent with the fact that the model finally proposed by Zvelebil involves, a structure superim- posed on the triadic model, a split between ‘‘pre-devotional,’’ ‘‘devotional’’ and ‘‘post-devotional literature,’’ choosing with bhakti a criterion that could not be more religious (Zvelebil 1992, pp. 15–17). Also M.S. Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r, whom we briefly referred to earlier as a critic of periodization practices in his work Jainism in South India, claims in another section of his book somewhat inconsistently that ‘‘the whole of Tamil literature may roughly be divided into three periods: (1) The Sangam or the Academic Period. (2) The period of Saiva Na¯yana¯rs and Vaishnava Alvars. (3) The Modern period’’ (Ramaswami Ayyangar 1922, pp. 35–36). This also shows how a tripartite model may retain its structure, despite substituting genre and religion as period markers. Though Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r leaves out the Jains here despite also using religion as a criterion for periodization, he gives good reasons for doing so, claiming that it is only by leaving them out that one is able, in any significant way, to bring them in (Ramaswami Ayyangar 1922, p. 89). But we will come back to this later when discussing predecessors to Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s own work. Indeed, if there is a model for writing literary history that Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r supports in those passages that are critical of periodization, it is not a model based on religion, but on genre. This brings us to the last two models of periodizing: those based on genre and religion. Ci.Vai. Ta¯mo¯taram Pil::lai, in the preface to his edition of the Vı¯raco¯liyam, was the first, in 1881, to use specific genre designations to define specific time brackets, as for example ‘‘the time of the grammars’’ (ilakkan: aka¯lam) or ‘‘the time of the Pura¯n: as’’ (itiha¯sa ka¯lam, 350–1150 CE), stopping short, however, of referring to genre in his overall periodization plan, which does not seem to follow a specific model. In fact, religion also plays an important role, since he correlates a period with little literary evidence with the Buddhists, and the period following that with the Jains.19 It seems as if M. Srı¯niva¯ca Aiyanka_ ¯r may have picked up this genre motif. His 1914 Tamil Studies includes the chapter ‘‘Periods of Tamil Literature’’ (Srinivasa Aiyangar 1986, pp. 185–230), in which we find, possibly for the first time, a critical discussion of several conflicting forms of periodization of Tamil literature. He calls Ta¯mo¯taran Pil::lai’s periodization ‘‘unscientific and historically monstrous’’ (Srinivasa Aiyangar 1986, p. 199) and discards Cu¯riyana¯ra¯yan: a Ca¯stiri’s periodization, which follows the early/medieval/modern model, just as easily on the grounds of its lacking basis in texts (Srinivasa Aiyangar 1986, pp. 200– 201). He discards Caldwell’s periodization (about which more below), and with him models derived from Caldwell’s, on the basis of supposedly incorrect dating (Srinivasa Aiyangar 1986, pp. 201–207), and the periodization of Elie Honore´ Julien Vinson, like that of Caldwell based on religious traditions, as lacking a proper

19 Ta¯mo¯taram Pil:l:ai’s periodization (Ta¯mo¯t:aram Pil:l:ai 1920, pp. 11–23) lists ‘‘the time of non[or pre]- literacy’’ (apo¯taka¯lam), ‘‘the time [of the emergence] of writing’’ (aks:araka¯lam), ‘‘the time of grammatical texts’’ (ilakkan: aka¯lam) and ‘‘the time of [Cankam]_ civilization’’ (camuta¯yaka¯lam), after which he posits an ‘‘immediately following time’’ (ana¯ta¯raka¯lam), in which Tamil supposedly lost its status as a literary language and which he also calls ‘‘the time of the Buddhists’’ (puttarka¯lam). This is immediately followed by ‘‘the time of the Jains’’ (caman: aka¯lam, Ta¯mo¯t:aram Pil:l:ai 1920, p. 18). 123 610 C. Emmrich understanding of the history of these religions. In this regard, he mentions that usually more than one religious tradition was responsible for the literary production of any one period, and even the period that Vinson grants to Jainism alone must be understood as marked by conflict (Srinivasa Aiyangar 1986, pp. 207–210). The model Srı¯niva¯ca Aiyanka_ ¯r then proposes (Srinivasa Aiyangar 1986, p. 211), and briefly elaborates in the remaining sections of the chapter, is quite differentiated. It proves to be based mainly on genre, rather than the criteria used by his predecessors. His periodization begins with an ‘‘Academic’’ period (600 BC–150 CE), followed by the ‘‘Classic’’ period (150–500 CE). These are followed by periods called ‘‘Hymnal’’ (500–950), ‘‘Translations’’ (950–1200) and ‘‘Exegetical’’ (1200–1450), which are the major part of his history, and he concludes with a period called ‘‘Miscellaneous’’ (1450–1850). It is particularly differentiated because the author sets other models, as secondary minor models, next to his own, attributing a religious category to each genre, and, at the same time, fitting his periods into a historical-linguistic framework of early/medieval/modern. The religion assigned to the ‘‘Classic’’ period, which is the least genre-based period, is ‘‘Jaina,’’ yet bizarrely this figures only in the table, while in the text the ‘‘Classic’’ period vanishes and becomes part of an extended ‘‘Academic’’ period, which stretches up to 500 CE, in which the Jains (apart from the Cilappatikaram and its traditionally ascribed author Ilanko)_ remain unmentioned. Srı¯niva¯ca Aiyanka_ ¯r’s genre model was followed by Es. Vaiya¯puri Pil::lai, in his 1956 History of Tamil Language and Literature (Vaiyapuripillai 1988; for earlier developments, see Vaiya¯puri Pil::lai 1962a), and his, aptly titled, 1957 Ka¯viyaka¯lam (‘‘The Time of Ka¯vya’’) (Vaiya¯puri Pil::lai 1962b). In the latter work he limits himself to a history of ka¯vya, which makes a more differentiated periodization necessary. In contrast, in his History he draws a divide between ‘‘From the beginning to 300 AD’’ and ‘‘AD 300–1000,’’ which he calls ‘‘Part I’’, followed by ‘‘Part II,’’ which lists ‘‘I. Anthologies,’’ ‘‘II. Grammatical Works,’’ and ‘‘III. The Didactic Works’’ as the first three periods, followed by ‘‘IV. Bhakti Movement’’ and a concluding period, beginning around 700 CE, interestingly called ‘‘Secular Lit- erature’’ (Vaiyapuripillai 1988, table of contents).20 This is interesting for us, as this final phase is where he locates the bulk of what are either presumably or without a doubt Jain works. If we follow the author’s dating, these were produced after the eighth century (Vaiyapuripillai 1988, pp. 100–119), which strips them, so to speak, of their religious content. Disregarding the fact that the last two periods could qualify as a periodization based on religious traditions, and focusing on the genre model in the works of S´rı¯niva¯ca Aiyanka_ ¯r and Vaiya¯puri Pil::lai, this periodization seems counterintuitive in the sense that genre, in and of itself, is not a historical category, inasmuch as genres may persist or undergo transformations over time. In addition, genre might actually be a useful tool for literary criticism across periods, despite the recent trend in literary history that questions genre categories and stresses their fluidity and hybrid nature, both through history and with regard to

20 For his discussion of ‘‘secular literature,’’ see Vaiyapuripillai (1988, pp. 96–119); for a more comprehensive critical analysis of Vaiya¯puri Pil:l:ai’s work, see Civatampi’s introductory note (xv–xlii) in his second edition. 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 611 individual works. But in these histories, we seem to be dealing with a different notion of genre, conceived as a literary form tied to a specific historical period. Nonetheless, there are clearly instances in which genre categories are difficult to apply, such as when looking at the very special situation of modernity, or dealing with the emergence or dominance of religious traditions. In his 1974 contribution to the series ‘‘A History of Indian Literature,’’ Zvelebil proposes a genre-oriented model that defines ‘‘genre’’ broadly enough to stretch its fluidity historically while securing its specificity. In the process, he avoids the abstraction of a tripartite periodization by choosing to structure his presentation with expressions such as ‘‘the solitary stanza,’’ ‘‘the literature of devotion,’’ ‘‘didactic heresy,’’ ‘‘the epic poetry,’’ ‘‘pirapantam,’’ and ‘‘literature in prose.’’21 Nevertheless, in the search for the Jains, the focal point of this synopsis, it has become clear how difficult it is to define genre without being guided by presuppositions regarding the historical position of particular religions, or, even more seriously, how such a model can be shaped by the role attributed to a specific genre by literary histories that favor or have emerged out of a specific religious literary tradition in the first place. Zvelebil’s subsections within ‘‘Epic poetry’’ remain defined by religion, first featuring a Caldwellian ‘‘Jaina cycle’’ and ‘‘Buddhist cycle,’’ followed by ‘‘Hindu,’’ ‘‘Christian’’ and ‘‘Muslim epics.’’ It is only from a ‘‘Dravidian/Sáivite’’ perspective on literary history that Zvelebil may call the section on didactic literature, featuring texts supposedly produced under the ‘‘increasing impact of Buddhist and Jaina doctrines and Northern culture’’ (Zvelebil 1973, p. 117), ‘‘heretical.’’22 The oldest, most stable and persistent model of periodization of Tamil literature is indeed that organized by religion. It goes back to a relatively short passage in Rev. Robert Caldwell’s 1856 introduction to A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages, whose outline starts with, of all things, ‘‘The Jaina Cycle (of the Madura Sangam),’’ (approx. eighth century CE to approx. thirteenth century CE).23 This supposedly initiated Tamil literature in the first place. Caldwell then moves on to ‘‘The Tamil Ra¯ma¯yana [sic] Cycle’’ (thirteenth century CE), followed by ‘‘The Sáiva Revival Cycle’’ (thirteenth to fourteenth century CE), and ‘‘The Vaishn: ava Cycle,’’ dated to the same period. To this he adds ‘‘The Cycle of Literary Revival’’ and ‘‘The Anti-Brahmanical Cycle’’ (Caldwell 1974, table of contents xi– xii, text 128–153). This kind of literary history, in which periods are attributed to particular religious traditions, mirroring the role religions play in the author’s

21 Zvelebil (1974, pp. vii–viii). Zvelebil elaborates: ‘‘Tamil literary history is here classified principally not by time, but by specifically literary types of organization or structure. It is viewed as a simultaneous order’’ (Zvelebil 1974, p. 2). 22 Zvelebil refers and gives some credit to A¯ lva¯rpil:l:ai Ve¯lupil:l:ai’s 1969 Tamililakkiyattil ka¯lamum karuttum, which proposes a rather unique, vaguely Hegelian periodization model that follows neither genre- nor religion-oriented models. Here, a ‘‘time of nature’’ (iyar- kainer-ikka¯lam) is followed by a ‘‘time of ethics’’ (ar- aner- ikka¯lam), a ‘‘time of religion’’ (camayaner-ikka¯lam), a ‘‘time of philosophy’’ (tattuv- aner-ikka¯lam) and a ‘‘time of science’’ (ar- iviyalner-ikka¯lam) (Zvelebil 1993, p. 15). Jain works remain confined to the ethical stage, i.e. a pre-religious, pre-philosophical and, like all pre-modern literature in Tamil, pre-scientific stage. 23 This term was again used by Zvelebil, although independently of Caldwell’s framework or dating (Zvelebil 1975, p. 171). 123 612 C. Emmrich political agenda, became very influential, the line continuing with, among others,24 Elie Honore´ Julien Vinson. Vinson breaks up Caldwell’s first cycle into ‘‘the period of tentative beginnings, of didactic tracts’’ (période de tâtonnements, des pam- phlets) on one hand, and ‘‘the period in which Jainism predominates’’ (période où le djâinisme domina) on the other, followed by ‘‘the vigorous return and triumph of Sáivism’’ (le retour offensive et le triomphe du çivaisme), which was ‘‘temporarily interrupted by the arrival of the Buddhists from Ceylon and by a recovery of Jainism after which Sáivism reigns uncontested and Vais:n: avism joins in a modest fashion’’ (Vinson 1903, pp. xl, xliii). The immensely influential Mu. Ci. Pu¯rn: a- linkam Pil::lai, in his A Primer of Tamil Literature, follows Vinson in throwing the Buddhists in with the Jains in his second period, ‘‘2. The age of Buddhists and Jains’’ (CE 100–600), ominously (ominous only for the Jains and the Buddhists, obviously) followed by ‘‘3. The age of religious revival’’ (CE 600–1100), drawing in its wake a not exclusively religiously defined ‘‘4. The age of literary revival’’ (CE 1100–1400) (Purnalingam Pillai 1994). Thus it is not surprising that the second chapter (Purnalingam Pillai 1994, pp. 112–152) begins with the statement: ‘‘Both Buddhists and Jains were Hindus and came from North India’’ (Purnalingam Pillai 1994, p. 112). The insertion of a Jain period is rendered unproblematic by their absorption into a generalized Hindu fold, to which the Jains stand in no opposition. As Chap. 2 comes to a close, they gently dissolve and leave no trace ‘‘with the decline of the Pallava dynasty’’ and ‘‘with their falling off in their ways and modes of life’’ (Purnalingam Pillai 1994, p. 140). More differentiated is Mar-aimalai At:kal: in his 1930 Ma¯n: ikkava¯cakar varala¯-rum ka¯lamum. He begins with the ‘‘time of pure Tamil,’’ (tan-- ittamilka¯lam, up to the first c. CE), which is followed by the ‘‘time of the Buddhists’’ (puttaka¯lam, first to fourth century) and the ‘‘time of the Jains’’ (caman: aka¯lam, fourth to seventh century). He continues with the ‘‘time of the Sáivas and Vais:n: avas’’ (caivavain: avaka¯lam, seventh to fourteenth century; Mar-aimalai At:ikal: 1930, I, p. 12 and, including dates, II, pp. 60–61), followed by the ‘‘time of the Brahmans’’ (pa¯rppan-- aka¯lam, fourteenth to eighteenth century) and the ‘‘time of the English’’ (a¯nkilaka_ ¯lam, eighteenth to present). His ‘‘times’’ (ka¯lams) are clearly defined as being either purely Tamil, i.e. Sáiva, or specifically non-Tamil forces (Sivathamby 1986, p. 109). Interestingly, Ka. Cuppriraman: iyan 25 -- Pil::lai, in his 1930 Ilakkiya varala¯-ru, has two Jain ka¯lams, one, the ‘‘time of Jain predominance’’ (caman: ar a¯:tcik ka¯lam, mid-fifth century just up to the mid-seventh century, with Saiva literature starting during this period, p. 255), and another called ‘‘the growth of Jain texts’’ (caman: aratu nu¯-rkil:arcci, tenth to thirteenth century). They are conveniently spread out to accommodate literature that is presumably of Jain origin of widely disparate dates. That religious periodization is not an old- fashioned relic is demonstrated by its pervasiveness in later works, such as

24 Other immediate followers of Caldwell’s model are mentioned by M. Srı¯niva¯ca Aiyanka_ ¯r as being W.W. Hunter, Grierson, Rost and Frazer (Srinivasa Aiyyangar 1914, pp. 204–207). 25 Cuppriraman: iya Pillai (1968). The contents page of part 1 of his work features ‘‘The Time of the Three Cankams, while that of part 2 lists the subsequent periods. Both chapters dealing with Tamil literature and the Jains, i.e. ‘‘the Time of Jain Predominance’’ (Suppriramaniya Pillai 1968, pp. 255–272) and ‘‘the Growth of Jain Texts’’ (Suppriramaniya Pillai 1968, pp. 318–330) limit themselves to brief bibliographic listings. 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 613

Mu. Arun: a¯calam’s 1973 Tamil ilakkiya varala¯-ru (Aruna¯chalam 1973, table of contents). Here, various Cankam_ periods, the last of which containing most works attributed to the Jains, are followed by ‘‘the time of devotional verse’’ (4. pa¯cura ka¯lam, 600–900 CE). Then, after the ‘‘time of Co¯la rule’’ (5. colar a¯tikka ka¯lam), comes a dramatic ‘‘time of religious awakening (6. camaya elucci ka¯lam, 1150– 1600), which stresses the Vais:nava_ commentaries. Kamil Zvelebil, whose reliance on bhakti for his pre-and post-devotional classification, as referred to above, openly confesses in his masterly 1973 survey of Tamil literature, The Smile of Murugan (Zvelebil 1973, p. xii), to be passing over both the Cı¯vakacinta¯man: i and the Vais:n: ava hymns, demonstrating the Sáiva-Dravidian slant already observed above. The fact that periodization grounded in religious traditions can be traced back to Caldwell, however, shows that it emerged as something new and in conversation with a European interest in certain kinds of literature, literature that was primarily and specifically religious, as well as the assumed role of certain religions in the historical trajectory of a people.26 The Jains feature more distinctly in these narratives only at crucial points of the story: they are variously seen as the originators of Tamil literature, as the early teachers who helped set a primitive Tamil literature on its way to greatness, as those who stood in the way of it finding its way back to its own true Sáiva roots, or as those who, now and again, take over to make a literary ‘‘contribution’’ from the outside of an ongoing literary process. While in later historiographies, the Jains are reduced to individual works and vanish as a unified ‘‘group’’, in the earlier narratives they seem to be manageable only as a group, in order to be contained and confined to a certain role restricted to a certain period of the past that is over and done with. This is only possible in a process that reduces Jain authors (and obviously not only them) to their religion and, particularly, their doctrine, forcing their texts to play a role in an imagined scenario that reduces historical change to a conflict about religious supremacy. Around the time of Caldwell’s writing, there were other experiments taking place in publications about Tamil literature that are witnesses to similar attempts.27 In Simon Casie Chitty’s 1982 The Tamil Plutarch (Chitty 1982), the authors are listed in alphabetical order, with short biographies and lists of works, as well as samples of their texts in Tamil with English translations. Chitty used this lexical organization to rework material that he retrieved from much older forms of literary history. These, too, did not involve periodization, but consisted of lists of authors names corresponding to titles. In its modern form, it reads like a predecessor to

26 Various early references to the Jains have been brought to our attention by Orr (2009), as well as the discussions about their role both in the Tamil-speaking region and throughout India, and their relation to the Buddhists and the S´aivas. First references were by missionaries, starting with Father Roberto De Nobili’s 1613 report, followed by Fathers Constantius Beschi, Bartholoma¨us Ziegenbalg and the Abbe´ Dubois, and later by the community of scholars around Col. Colin Mackenzie and the Madras School of Orientalism in the early years of the nineteenth century, particularly Francis Buchanan and Francis Whyte Ellis. The judgements made by these authors regarding the Jains were to become the dominant source for models such as those presented by Caldwell and his successors. 27 Zvelebil refers to a number of works that may or may not be called attempts at periodization, as they write a history of literature based on the periodic unit of the calendrical century, such as Co¯macuntara Te¯cikar, Mayilai Cı¯n-- i. Ve¯nkat_ :aca¯mi, and to a certain degree also Mu. Arun: a¯calam (Zvelebil 1993, pp. 12–13, references in n. 3–5). 123 614 C. Emmrich

Zvelebil’s Tamil Lexicon; it is more lexicography than historiography. One must bear in mind, however, that while the organization of data is different here, one can nevertheless expect to find an underlying historiographical agenda reflected in the entries. In Zvelebil’s case, the periodization presented in his other works, referred to above, may have determined the way individual entries in his Lexicon were con- ceptualized and written. Nonetheless, it is doubtful that this is also the case in Chitty’s work, since the first documented attempt at periodization had been completed only three years earlier. Rather, one would expect quite distinct conventions of writing literary history dominating this kind of early work. The predominance of the individual author and his works in this kind of composition contrasts sharply with the larger, later narratives, which consist either of undulating models of rise and decay, or serial models of alternating paradigms of predominance, within which individual authors and works fall and are supposed to be expressing. As to be expected from a work that predates the ‘‘discovery’’ of the Cı¯vakacinta¯man: i, the Jain layer in Chitty is extremely thin. Jainism appears in descriptions of the backgrounds of individual poets,28 key hagiographical feats of the Sáiva bhakti saints,29 and a brief reference to the claims of the Jains to the early Tiruval::luvar, author of the Tirukkur- al: (henceforth Kur- al:) (Chitty 1982, p. 116). This shows that confining the Jains to the periphery within a dominant Sáiva literary discourse is not restricted to periodization. It is with periodization and the modern literary histories that their role expands and contracts, one might even say pulsates, here and there subsiding dramatically. We will see below the range of valences within which this happens. The development of this form of literary lists of names, as reworked by Chitty, may go back to historiographical practices based on the grouping of authors around dynasties, courts or kings, or, on an even more basic level, mechanisms of pairing works with the names of authors, kings or others. This kind of attributive practice has always been highly contentious. Whereas grouping poets around dynasties, courts or kings may be directed by a political agenda of prestige building, attributing works to authors affiliated with a particular religious tradition, while being directed by a comparable agenda, additionally raises conflicting claims regarding the religious affiliation of the work in question. Historically, this has led to debates about how certain passages of works are to be read, in order to validate this or that claim. While the affiliation of works and poets with political power stresses their connection to a particular time and date, names and events, the affiliation with religious traditions (though not excluding the latter and necessarily favoring names as part of sectarian lineages) particularly refers to specific doctrines, supra-human agents and practices.

28 Such as (in alphabetical order) the poet and astronomer Appar Appa¯vaiyer, author of the Ta¯n: t:avama¯lai, of whom ‘‘nothing is known except that he was a Jaina Brahman’’ (Chitty 1982, p. 9), the prosodist Amitaca¯karar (tenth/eleventh century), author of the Ya¯pperunkalakka_ ¯rikai, ‘‘a follower of the Jaina religion’’ (Chitty 1982, p. 6), the poet Man: t:alapurutar (sixteenth century), ‘‘a Jain ascetic’’, author of the encyclopedic Cu¯l:a¯man: inikan: t:u and ‘‘of an epic poem in honour of Arha, the God of the Jaina sect,’’ (Chitty 1982, p. 60), and ﬁnally Na¯takavira¯ja Nampi, author of the Tirukalampakam, and Pavananti, author of the Nan-- --nu¯l, (both twelfth/thirteenth century), said to be ‘‘born and bred in a Jaina family’’ and ‘‘a son of Jaina sage,’’ respectively (Chitty 1982, pp. 73, 79). 29 Appar (Chitty 1982, p. 9), Kulapatiya¯r (Chitty 1982, p. 52), Campantar (Chitty 1982, pp. 94–95) and Cuntarar (Chitty 1982, p. 109). 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 615

In addition to the author list form of literary history, another model exists. It also is in contrast to and precedes periodization, and may go as far back. This is the practice of grouping not authors, but texts. Writing such lists may be connected, among other things, to the curricula of traditional monastic schools in Tamil Nadu, as described by U.Ve. Ca¯mina¯taiyar in his above-mentioned autobiography and consulted by Cutler (2003, pp. 276–281). Such groupings follow, as Cutler calls it, ‘‘primarily generic rather than historical’’ principles (Cutler 2003, p. 281), anticipating the genre-oriented model of modernist literary histories. However, there is reason to be cautious in downplaying this historical form (if not its sense) to organizational principles, like genre, that do not obey the laws of a chronology based on dating. Indeed, such groupings go much further back in time and have their own history. Texts have been grouped since the time their titles and authors have been mentioned in other texts. As Cutler, following Civatampi, carefully points out, these groupings may be connected to anthologizing practices that go back to the compilation of the Cankam_ anthologies (Cutler 2003, p. 305). Cutler arrives at this historical possibility in his analysis of the anthological work Pur- attirat::tu. Here, while relativising Civatampi’s insistence on the Cankam,_ Sáiva and Vais:n: ava canons as ‘‘landmarks in the consciousness relating to the Tamil literary heritage and Tamil literary thought’’ (Sivathamby 1986, p. 44), Cutler eloquently demonstrates ways to explore how ‘‘the literary consciousness and the historical consciousness related to one another’’ beyond sectarian boundaries (Cutler 2003, pp. 307–318). These groupings of texts might also be understood on the much larger logistic scale of compilatory lexicography, in which knowledge about and through texts is bibliographically organized by means of naming and sorting. This does not necessarily imply canonization, but a more technical, diverse and variable type of organization.30 It is also different than the interventionist handling and redacting of textual bodies, on the basis of which curricula, copying activities and library building might have been initiated, redirected or coordinated. Whether Cutler is right, to return to his insight, in criticizing Civatampi for choosing explicitly religious canons, and maintaining that studying what he terms ‘‘literary’’ texts may have a more powerful claim for explaining literary history (Cutler 2003, pp. 307–308) cannot be discussed here in more detail. However, Cutler may be right in the sense that Civatampi’s choice of texts perpetuates a modernist Sáiva/Vais:n: ava-dominated historiographical paradigm. Following Cutler’s reservations in this matter, it would indeed be productive to ask what a literary history would look like if it were written from the perspective of the Jain community. Following his predilection for ‘‘literary’’ texts would, however, prompt the question what kind of literary history we would then set out to write. Also, with regard to our main question, this would probably impose a reading, of most texts associated with Jains in literary histories so far, that would minimize, if not remove, the religious, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of the religiously mediated contexts of their production and reception. It would not allow us to develop tools to define a particular form of Jain religious sensitivity, or to navigate that vast literary field in which an individual author and the echoes of other authors’ texts, the religious and the non-religious and the Jain and the non-Jain,

30 See the work done in this direction by John Cort on lay Jain curricula (Cort 2004), to which we will return below. 123 616 C. Emmrich intermingle. And it would particularly not provide a vantage point from which to question the supposed binaries of that me´lange. An analysis of lists of works and curricula circulating among the Jain community and the associated practices and those historically derived therefrom, along the lines of Cutler’s masterly analysis of the Pur- attirat::tu, rather than what Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar picked from them or insisting on texts that betray as little Jainism as possible, would help us move closer to such a vantage point.

The Jaina Author as Agent and Patient of History

Before taking a closer look at how the models discussed so far appear in Appaca¯mi Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s Jaina Literature in Tamil, it may be useful to briefly review the roles attributed to the Jains in all the Tamil literary historiographies reviewed above, whether specific to their representational model or in mixed forms.31 First, it is important to note that the Jains are attributed some kind of role in all the models found in literary histories of any influence: none of the narratives I have encountered fail to mention the Jains completely, and when they are mentioned, it is somehow significant for the overall narrative. The most basic role of the Jains, shared by all the above-mentioned historians independently of how they assess it, is that of a religious person and, more precisely, as one primarily defined by the doctrine he supposedly propounds, first and foremost that of ahim: sa¯, secondarily that of karma. References to monasticism are rare, to Jain worship, art or material culture, even rarer. The Jain layperson does not exist.32 The result of identifying Jainism with religious doctrine, and only specific doctrines at that, leads to the circular assumption made in literary histories that the Jains are present anywhere those specific doctrines are expressed, or, less so, related practices are referred to. Conversely, these doctrinal markers must be found in anything assumed to be authored by a Jain. Apart from narrowing down the literary endeavor of answering the question ‘‘Jain or not Jain,’’ this reduces the spectrum of what it may have meant to be Jain in South Indian society at a certain historical point in time, or what it may

31 As it would beyond the scope of this article, I will merely point out here that, regarding the role of the Jains, it might be fruitful to contrast histories of Tamil literature in Tamil with Kannada and Malayalam literary histories. While Kannada literature would represent a more independent and wider field of inquiry, in the case of Malayalam, which for historical and linguistic reasons is more closely related to Tamil, the question might be complicated by just that relative proximity. The fact that Malayalam and Tamil are separate languages and that their literatures are also distinct has been a primary political concern in modern Malayalam nationalist literary historical discourses, when they refer to historical times in which the Jains might seen as having made a difference. To mention just one example, in Krishna Chaitanya’s English history of Malayalam literature, Il:anko_ ¯vat:ikal:, the author of the Cilappatika¯ram, was aCe¯ra prince first and only secondly a Jain (Chaitanya 1971, pp. 5, 29). And although Jainism and Buddhism are characterized as positive (‘‘enjoyed high prestige’’), they are also considered evanescent (‘‘a Hindu revival led to their eclipse,’’ Chaitanya 1971, p. 5; cp. 74). The Jains are not referred to at all in K.M. George’s A History of Malayalam Literature (George 1968) and in Ayappar Paniker’s essays (Paniker 1996). 32 Leslie Orr’s groundbreaking work has criticized both old positions and opened new perspectives in this regard (Orr 1998). Schalk and Al:va¯pil:l:ai Ve¯luppillai (2002, p. 203) makes a highly interesting yet not further elaborated point about the connection between the spread of bhakti and the emergence of a Jain lay community. 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 617 have meant to be a Jain author, and how that may or may not be evident in a text. This of course precludes the possibility that the text helps us rethink what this may have meant back then in the first place. Reducing the Jain to doctrine produces another problem, depending on how a particular literary history understands ‘‘doctrine’’: doctrine can be either ‘‘religion/theology’’ or ‘‘ethics/science.’’ This allows those critical of the role of the Jains in Tamil literary history to read it as the former, opposing it to Sáivism and the Vedas; for those appreciative of the Jains, it can be presented as the latter, a ‘‘secular,’’ ‘‘rational’’ and essentially non-sectarian set of instructions. Both views lie behind the oft-repeated view of the Jain as primarily a ‘‘propagator’’ of his ‘‘faith,’’ who ‘‘uses’’ the Tamil language and his superior poetic skills to propagate his faith by giving it an attractive form, and, implicitly, by demonstrating (or convincing the public to accept) its superiority.33 It remains an open question how much of this was about strategically writing themselves into Tamil literature, with the aim of filling Tamil literature with Jain content, or to merely act as agents of a Jain interest in influence that has no doctrinal intentions. Takanobu Takahashi’s recent papers on Tamil Jainism seem to favor the latter interpretation, but go further. He dismisses religious doctrine completely as an indicator for Jain content, doctrine for him including the explicitly religious as well as the ‘‘merely ethical’’ (Takahashi 2009a, b). Takahashi proposes a fascinating new test for determining whether a work is Jain or not, which overturns all the religiously and doctrinally oriented methodologies: ‘‘‘if a work does not show any inclination to or any tint peculiar to a specific religion, it is of a Jain’’’ (Takahashi 2009b, p. 8). In both cases, the disembodied doctrine is primary for the course of literary events, their one-dimensional representatives secondary. This leads us to the second frequently mentioned role of the Jains, that of being educators, either in the sciences or, more prominently, with regard to ethical conduct. The association of the so-called didactical literature, with the Jains placed towards the beginning of literary narratives, is part of the idea that it took the Jains to ethicize the Tamils and their literature. The Jains introduced, changed or raised the standards of moral conduct to a certain ineffable pre-existing substrate.34 Hence in this, as in the following role, the Jains appear crucial for the beginning of

33 Vaiya¯puri Pil:l:ai maintains that the Jains ‘‘tried to gain the allegiance of the people by writing stories about royal personages who figured largely in the history of their religion and culture and about their saints and other great men’’ (Vaiyapuripillai 1988, p. 98; cf. Vaiyapuripillai 1988, p. 100). 34 Authors such as M. Srı¯niva¯ca Aiyanka_ ¯r and Cata¯civa Pan:t:a¯ratta¯r surmise a ‘‘low state of morality among the early Tamils’’ (Srinivasa Aiyangar 1986, p. 193; cf. Pan: d:a¯ratta¯r 1955, p. 24) before the joint impact of Brahmanism, Buddhism and Jainism. In contrast, the Je¯cuta¯can-- s deny such amoral substrate and leave out the Brahmans when stating that ‘‘[t]he Jains, like the Buddhist, lay particular emphasis on the moral conduct of man’’ (Jesudasan and Jesudasan 1961, p. 51), and speak of ‘‘the awakening of the ethical consciousness in the post-Sangam period, by the impact of Jainism and Buddhism.’’ This is qualified, however, by adding that ‘‘in one very important fact the Tamilians [...] rejected Jain and Buddhist ethics, and that is in the attitude to woman’’ (Jesudasan and Jesudasan 1961, pp. 158–159). Cutler refers to ‘‘certain widely accepted versions of Tamil literary history’’ when talking about ‘‘an age characterized by a strong didactic bent, due at least in part to the influence of Buddhism and Jainism,’’ but he does not question, qualify or contextualize this view (Cutler 2003, p. 293). 123 618 C. Emmrich literature in Tamil. They are the originators,35 a role that helps those authors begin their histories who, for several reasons usually connected to the other roles we discuss here, see in the Jain the ideal candidate for their respective narratives of origin. The third role, one that we find as recently as in Cutler’s article, is that of being poets and masters of the sciences: several of the canonized ‘‘great works’’ of Tamil literature, including normative works on grammar and metrics, are associated with the possible involvement, if not outright authorship of Jains. In this role, the Jains function as literary and technical experts who have injected practical expertise and textual knowledge into a society or literary elite, thus again either initiating a process, changing the ways, or raising the level at which literature is produced (Jesudasan and Jesudasan 1961, p. 131; Celvanayakam 1951, p. 99). And if not this, they at least further enriched what was already there or was ongoing, such as the development of the Tamil language (Vaiyapuripillai 1988, p. 31). A positive con- sequence of this reading, shared, among others, by both Cutler, as we have seen, and sometimes by Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r, as we shall see, is that whatever the Jains produced is useful for the study of Tamil literature as a whole. This appraisal is ruled by the view that, as Anne Monius points out in her contribution elsewhere in this journal issue, for authors like Ca¯mina¯t Aiyer, at least the literary works in question are firstly Tamil and only secondarily Jain. Both this and the preceding role are undoubtedly positive, inasmuch as the Jains are functionalized in the literary narratives in which they figure as a force that directly and vigorously brought about what the respective literary historians regard as good and valuable in the Tamil language and literature.36 For these authors, the Jains are good and strong, sophisticated and nurturing.37 Authors with a more neutral standpoint play down the

35 On the authors who explicitly begin their periodizations with a ‘‘Jaina cycle,’’ such as Caldwell, and refer to the Jains when dealing with the earliest extant texts, see the overview above. For Celvana¯yakam, it is the Jains rather than the Buddhists from whom the Tamils received their literary ‘‘education’’ (Celvana¯yakam 1951, p. 101). 36 Vaiya¯puri Pil:l:ai summarizes both roles when he writes that ‘‘[t]the Buddhists and Jains gave a moral tone to the Tamilan society and literature and inspired them to literary expressions of a diversified character. The didactic works, grammars, kavyas, lexicons and other works were produced in abundance’’ (Vaiyapuripillai 1988, p. 119). ‘‘Being literary craftsmen of a higher type, they produced works of great literary importance in Tamil’’ (Vaiyapuripillai 1988, p. 98); similarly Peterson (1998, pp. 166–167). For Mı¯n-- a¯t:cicuntaran-- a¯r they ‘‘made Tamil grow, made Tamil live’’ (tamilai val:arttut tamilai va¯lac ceytu, Min-- a¯tcicuntaran-- a¯r 1965, p. 166). 37 Ta¯mo¯taram Pil:l:ai sees the Tamil language, which after the end of the ‘‘time of [Cankam]_ civilization’’ (camuta¯yaka¯lam) is not patronized by Ce¯ras, Co¯las and Pa¯n: t:yas, as a daughter (celvı¯) wandering around for a period of roughly 200 years, as if having lost her formerly high status (Ta¯mo¯taram Pil:l:ai 1920, pp. 17–18). He contrasts this by saying that ‘‘the emergence of the Jains in the period after the Can: kam is like a motherless girl (ta¯yir- antapen: ) acquiring a virtuous stepmother (car- kun: anir- ainta cir--ra¯tta¯l:)’’ (cankattin_ -- pir-ka¯lañ caman: ar talaippat:t:atu ta¯yir- antapen: n:ukko¯r car-kun:anir-ainta cir--ra¯tta¯l: va¯yttatu po¯lum, Ta¯mo¯taram Pil:l:ai 1920, p. 18). The allegorical depiction of texts as children, and Rezeptionsgeschichte as childcare in its transition from one social mother to another, is an old trope, documented, for instance, in the fifth individual verse of praise (tan-- iyan-- ) to the Tiruva¯ymoli, the Tamil Vedas, attributed to Para¯sára Bhat:t:ar, where the a¯ca¯ryas of the S´rı¯vais:n: ava community are praised for raising the child which is the allegory of the Tamil Vedas. The first mother (mutalta¯y) is Cat:ako¯pan-- (Namma¯lva¯r) and the nursing foster mother (it:atta¯y)isRa¯ma¯nuja (va¯--ntikaluñco¯lai matil:arankarvan_ : pukalme¯l/a¯--n-ratamilmar-a- ikal:a¯yiramum¯ ı--n-ra / mutaltay cat:ako¯pan-- moyppa¯l val:artta it:atta¯y ira¯ma¯--nucan-- //). 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 619 importance of both roles and the actual extent of the Jains’ influence, either as poets or as educators. In these narratives, the works supposedly written by Jains do not supply enough evidence to support this supposition: the works are internally either ‘‘not Jain enough’’, the attribution of the work to a Jain name is arguably spurious, or the fact that the author may or may not be a Jain is simply irrelevant.38 The faintness of impact claimed here leads to a further, fourth role: that of being gentle, weak and somewhat ineffectual. Pu¯rn: alinkam_ Pil::lai’s position, quoted above, of the Jains actually being reformist Hindus goes together with the claim that ‘‘[t]hey never attacked the ancient, unadulterated Saivism, but were friendly to it, as their Tamil compositions amply testify,’’ and that they vanished, not through conflict, but as if through implosion, by failing to adhere to their own lofty ideals (Purnalingam Pillai 1994, pp. 112, 140; cf. below Chakravarti 1936, p. 26). This claim stands in sharp contrast to a more aggressive role attributed to them that we will refer to below. Those literary historical narratives in which the Jains generally figure the least are usually the ones which give them a fifth, rather pervasive role, in line with the neutralist understatement of these achievements: that of the doomed and vanquished loser in Tamil literary history. In some cases, the Jains are introduced in passing as those who did not matter after a certain point (Lehmann 2009, p. 67) or, more positively and more dramatically, the role of the impaled or erased.39 The vanishing Jain is also combined with the first two roles, in which the Jain is turned into the actor who had his time in the limelight of history as an educator and master poet, played his role, handed over his goods, lost out and exited.40 The second, more dramatically structured variant of the role of the Jain as victim leads us to the sixth important role, located at the opposite end of the Jain as educator: the Jain as the antagonist or villain, which reminds one of the topoi either of the anti-Brahmin of orientalist-indological vintage,41 or of the false, wicked and immoral Jain, the ‘‘ettar, kaiyar, and kun::tar (deceivers, rogues, wicked or base men)’’ in the hagiographies of the Na¯yan-- a¯rs (quoted after Peterson 1998, p. 170). In modern historiographic accounts, such as that of Celvana¯yakam, it is their bad

38 Takahashi, applying the methodology referred to above, has argued in a series of papers against the Jain authorship of a whole range of works generally attributed to Jains in Tamil literary historiography, such as the Tolka¯ppiyam, the Kur-al and the Cilappatika¯ran, with only the Perunkatai_ and the Cı¯vakacinta¯man: i passing the test by failing to produce any proof of any religious affiliation at all (Takahashi 2009b; cp. Takahashi 2009a). 39 ‘‘The earliest Nighantu (lexicon) in Tamil, Diva¯karam, is a Jain work. Forgetting this, Saivaite scribes and editors have placed Siva’s name at the beginning of the first section in contravention of Jain practice’’ (Vaiyapuripillai 1988, p. 117). 40 Indira Peterson’s important study of the complex ways in which the religious competition between Jains and Sáivas developed, which has been a model for my own work, clearly subverts such a reading, showing among other things, how the Sáivas adopted Jain genres and idioms in developing their own literature (Peterson 1998, p. 179). Anne Monius’ work on the Periyapura¯n: am follows similar lines (Monius 2004a, b). 41 Caldwell states that ‘‘[t]he Jainas of the old Pa¯n: d:ya country were animated by a national [sic] and anti- Brahmanical feeling of peculiar strength’’ (Caldwell 1974, p. 129). In Celvana¯yakam’s narrative of succeeding dynastic rule, the ascendency of the Jains necessarily leads to the crumbling of the brick temples built previously by Sáiva and Vais:n: ava, and it is the combined rise of the latter that inevitably lead to the downfall of the former (Celvana¯yakam 1951, pp. 98–100). 123 620 C. Emmrich conduct (olukkak ke¯:tu) and fraudulent appearance (po¯li ve¯:tam) that led to the Jains’ historical demise (Celvana¯yakam 1951, p. 101). On the other hand, they (together with the Buddhists and, for the Dravidian movement, the Brahmans) are made to play the role of those who estrange the Tamils from their natural character, culture, religion, language and lead them astray. This is, in the words of Nı¯laka¯n::taSa¯stiri quoted above, they are the mark of ‘‘the evil rulers called Kalabhras’’ who ‘‘have come’’ (a possible allusion to their assumed ‘‘foreign’’ origin) and ‘‘upset the established political order,’’ giving their name to the barbarous ‘‘Kala¯bhra Inter- regnum’’ in which the Buddhist and Jains are assumed to have flourished.42 The Jains’ association with cataclysmic events resonates in Celvana¯yakam’s image of the Jain religion spreading ‘‘like a forest wildfire in the land.’’43 But it is also a necessary evil that makes the Tamils return to themselves and motivates their response and their struggle to re-establish what was lost. The Jains’ function as villains who allow the hero to emerge victorious gives the Jains their rightful and decisive place in narratives such as these. Depending on which variant of Tamilness this role has as a background, the Jain is either one who stands entirely outside the Vedic fold, the non-Sáiva and non-Vaidika (Peterson 1998, pp. 179–183), or in the Dravidian discourse, the brahman or the vaisýa, either priest or shopkeeper, i.e. the opposite and oppressor of the soil-tilling ur-Tamil Vellalar.44 Indira Peterson has astutely pointed out that it is not, from a doctrinal angle, the marking of the Jains as non-Sáiva and non-Vaidika that changed the rules of discourse to their disadvan- tage, but the decisive linking of being Sáiva and being Vaidika with being Tamil (Peterson 1998, p. 176). This leads us to the seventh possible role of the Jain, a role that in these narratives merges perfectly with that of the villain: the Jain as the non-Tamil. Interestingly, this seems to be the most persistent, accommodating and convincing role, since it is equally present in those historiographies that either condemn the Jains absolutely or deal with them as a productive challenge, as well as in those that praise the role of the Jains for their ‘‘contributions.’’ This term is used so frequently

42 Nilakanta Shastri (1966, pp. 144–145). That the Kala¯bhra Interregnum has such a low profile in literary histories may be explained by the very problem of having to explain how literary texts that serve as foundations for Tamil literary history could have been produced in a country run by an ‘‘enemy of civilization’’ (Nilakanta Shastri 1966, p. 144). As long as there is no radical reassessment of the valence of the Kala¯bhra Interregnum, such difficulties will persist. Nonetheless, there are signs of such re-evaluating by authors who are critical of Sáiva dominance, falling into the camp of those who favor a positive assessment of the role played by Jains and Buddhists. 43 ka¯t:uttı¯ypo¯la na¯t:enkum_ paravat tot:ankiya_ caman: acamayam (Celvana¯yakam 1951, p. 99). 44 Kan: akacapa¯pati Kaila¯capati has explained the militancy of the supposedly compassionate Tamil Sáiva and Vais:n: ava bhaktas against the Jains from a Marxist perspective, seeing it as a class struggle between agriculturalist serfs and domineering traders. He even explains the development of bhakti poetry and the development of a love for Tamil as a literary language by means of this conflict (Kailacapati 1961). Chelva Kanakanayakam, to whom I am indebted for this reference, points out that a conflict of this type is not supported by the literary material in which overt antagonism towards the Jains plays a minor role in comparison to other key bhakti themes (Kanaganayakam 2010, p. 3). 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 621 when referring to Jain literature in Tamil45 that it might be worth citing only the instances in which it is absent, even if the author praises those ‘‘contributions’’ in the most enthusiastic terms.46 On all sides, the Jains are those who are historically not Tamil although they had an impact on the Tamils, whether bad or good, whether negligible or enormous, and have, although one might disagree as to what degree, made them and their literature what we now know. The perception of their for- eignness may be meaningfully connected to three attitudes: (1) since the Jains are non-Tamils, they were good for Tamil literature because they educated, beautified, and improved what the Tamils, by themselves, were unable to do; (2) they were bad for Tamil literature because, by imposing themselves, they temporarily kept the Tamils from preserving their Tamilness; or (3) they are irrelevant for Tamil literature because if we are dealing with things Tamil, like Sáivism, the Dravidian or the Tamil language, we do not need to refer to them. The past tense of the first two attitudes and, above all, the timelessness of the third brings us to the eighth and last role, or rather non-role, attributed to the Jains, over which the same kind of pervasive consensus rules as with their non-Tamilness: the Jain as absent. Such a role may be already seen as prefigured in those readings that play down the presence of Jains in Tamil literature throughout its history. Takahashi’s proposed rule, mentioned above, ‘‘if a work does not show any inclination to or any tint peculiar to a specific religion, it is of a Jain’’ (Takahashi 2009b, p. 8), may also be read as a novel formulation of the role of the absent Jain. Here he figures as ‘‘the man without qualities,’’ i.e. without religious qualifications; he is undetectable as a religious agent because he does not appear as one, in the sense of ‘‘where you do not see anyone (religious) that is where the Jain is.’’ The powerful twist of this reading is that it undermines almost all other roles: the Jain does not have a role in literature because he does not play one, because he has no traits. It is the role of the vanquished that this reading deconstructs most powerfully: firstly, the Jain in literature was not vanquished because he was never there; and secondly, his absence was brought about by no one other than himself, by the way he decided to be present by being absent. Whether, as with all the other historiographical models discussed here, this is indeed a productive way of describing what Jain authors intended and did is an issue that a study other than the present paper will have to investigate. Yet this reading, apart from allowing us to question what we mean when we say ‘‘Jain,’’ may

45 E.g. Vaiyapuripillai (1988, p. 31), Ramaswami Ayyangar (1922, p. 81), Schalk and A¯ l:va¯ppil:l:ai Ve¯luppil:l:ai (2002, p. 167) and even Chakravarti (1974, p. 136), and the introductions, both that of 1941 and that of 1974 by Ramesh (Chakravarti 1974, v and xix). Some prefer to talk of ‘‘impact’’ or ‘‘influence’’ (Jesudasan and Jesudasan 1961, pp. 38, 50, 70; Cutler 2003, p. 293; Zvelebil 1992, p. 29); Zvelebil, while at some point calling the impact ‘‘foreign’’ (Zvelebil 1974, p. 117), elsewhere also lets Jainism join the ‘‘mainstream’’ (Zvelebil 1992, p. 28). 46 Civatampi very perspicaciously points out that while authors like M. Mukammatu Uvais, when writing about Tamil Muslims and their literature, speak about the ‘‘Muslim contribution to Tamil literature’’ (Uwise 1953), a trend that Civatampi identifies as solidifying in the 1950s, ‘‘there is no tradition in Tamil referring to the Saivaite literature as a contribution to Tamil (Sivathamby 1986, p. 96). Having said this, there are also examples, like D. Ra¯jarikam’s The History of Tamil Christian Literature (Rajarigam 1958), that do not use this term. Of course, the use of the word ‘‘contribution’’ in such uncritical ways is not limited to histories of Tamil literature, as Krishna Chaitanya’s otherwise very progressive A History of Malayalam Literature (Chaitanya 1971, p. 195) shows. 123 622 C. Emmrich allow us to think about the ways the Jain dissolves into or emerges from the diverse practices of writing literature in Tamil. On the other hand, it may help us understand what it means to write and read Tamil literature by looking at the ways in which individuals, groups and roles dissolve in or emerge from those practices. This might be particularly crucial where the Jain is conspicuously absent. The Jains neither figure in what Tamil literary histories map out as the present, the ‘‘Modern Period’’ of many narratives, nor in the related depictions of the current state of the Tamil land. They are not seen as social, political, cultural or religious players, or, and even less so, as producers of literature. The Jain-less present extends well into the past, back to the seventeenth century.47 All of the literary histories converge most solidly in saying there is no present role of the Jains, they have no presence in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries as a community of living persons and authors. They are only seen as rarefied voices or as reverberations of a past encounter that only lives on in Tamil texts. To paraphrase Anne Monius’ book title (Monius 2009), no such place for Jainism is imaginable. More recent studies from North America, such as that referred to by Indira Petersen as well as those by Richard Davis, Leslie Orr and James Ryan,48 have contributed greatly to drawing a much more differentiated picture, and have indeed begun to dissolve some of the roles depicted here, at least concerning Jains from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, although it is still a picture limited to this early period. However, as we have seen, the listed roles, taken individually as well as in their range and diversity, are not black and white. Dissolving one role may come at the cost of inadvertently strengthening another. One must also bear in mind that most of these more recent analyses were published in an edited volume on Jainism (Cort 1998), not one on Tamil religion or literature. Optimistically speaking, it may take a while before these innovative approaches have an impact on how Tamil literary histories are written, or for a more assertive, less cliche´d Tamil Jain to emerge, instead of remaining absent and being doomed to play that final role. The emerging work by Maheshwari (2009) and the studies of the independent Chennai- based scholar S. Anvar are important signs that a different kind of research is indeed possible. To bring together the two strands we have been following so far, literary historiographical models and the roles that are modeled through them, and in order to understand from where the Jain voice may come in at all, in spite of its declared absence, we should do the following: We should take the last two, non-periodizing models of literary historiography we have looked at very seriously, the authors list and the text list. This we should do not so much to understand how the periodization paradigm changes the way literary histories are written, but rather to be aware of the fact that these two models may help us reach back to a time when literature was not

47 E.g. Peterson (1998, p. 167). Although A¯ l:va¯ppil:l:ai Ve¯lupil:l:ai states that ‘‘there were no literary contributions of general interest that made an impact on Tamil scholarship after the sixteenth century,’’ as far as I can see he is the only author to acknowledge that ‘‘Jain literary efforts in Tamil never ceased ¯ because the Tamil Cain-- ar continued to survive at least as an insigniﬁcant minority’’ (Schalk & Al:va¯pil:lai Ve¯luppil:l:ai 2002, p. 195). 48 Their contributions to the ﬁeld (Davis 1998; Orr 1998; Peterson 1998; Ryan 1985, 1998) have been elegantly summarized by Monius (2001, p. 4). 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 623 organized on the basis of historical models that take the Jains’ absence for granted, a time in which the Tamil Jains themselves may have talked and written about their literature. Further, they may help us see that these earlier models have not died out, but persist and keep operating even while literary historians periodize away. But we should also be aware of how the roles, both implicit and explicit in dominant literary histories, are accepted, reinforced, exchanged, refuted or ignored, and how old strategies of dealing with these old attributions might get through if a Jain were to write a literary history. Appaca¯mi Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s Jaina Literature in Tamil is a rare example of that kind of persistence: both of alternative earlier models and of the Jain who does not want to go away. He is rather a Jain who is surprised at the degree to which he still exists, exists where he thought he never even had a place to speak of.

The Jain Among Us

Appaca¯mi Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s Jaina Literature in Tamil was originally published in 1941 by the Jain publishing house Siddhanta Bhavana in Arrah, Bihar, and though dated in many aspects, the monograph on Jain literature in Tamil that might replace this work, at least as the default monograph to be quoted in this ﬁeld, still 49 waits to be written. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r (1880–1960), whose Jain last name ‘‘Na¯yan-- a¯r’’ ﬁgures neither on the cover nor anywhere else in the book except in a solitary instance,50 was indeed a Tamil Digambara (Tam. tikamparan) Jain. He was Professor, or rather, as his title went, ‘‘Senior Lecturer in Mental and Moral Philosophy,’’ at Presidency College, Madras from 1917. He had subsequent

49 Chakravarti 1951a draws from sections of this monograph. The historiography of Jain literature in the Tamil-speaking region since the appearance of Jaina Literature in Tamil has developed only tentatively. While Mayilai Cı¯n-- iVe¯nkat_ :aca¯mi’s 1954 Caman: amum tamilum (Ve¯nkat_ :aca¯mi 2000) is primarily interested in patronage history and doctrine, E.S. Varatara¯c Aiyar’s 1957 Tamil ilakkiya varala¯ru. Caman: a pautta vain: ava ilakkiyam. Varatara¯c Aiyar (1957) adds nothing new to the field. T: e¯.Po. Mı¯n-- a¯t:cicuntaran-- a¯r’s 1965 Caman: at tamil ilakkiya varala¯-rum (Mı¯n-- a¯t:cicuntaran-- a¯r 1965) which, like Varatara¯c Aiyar’s study, appeared before Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s work was in its second edition, may not be groundbreaking, but presents a useful expansion on the material covered by Cakravarti, e.g. Chap. 6.1 on the Jain vacan: a (prose interspersed with verse) literature in general, and the Srı¯pura¯n: am in particular. Also very useful is the ‘‘Jaina Literature in Tamil’’ section of Joseph’s encyclopedic compendium Jainism in South India (Joseph 1997, pp. 323–335), which gives the most up-to-date account of archives, editions and translations. Desai’s 1957 Jainism in South India and Some Jaina Epigraphs is an important source, but mentions literature only occasionally and unsystematically. In this sense it is close to the work of Schalk and A¯ l:va¯pil:lai Ve¯luppil:l:ai and the chapter on the Jains by A¯ l:va¯pil:lai Ve¯luppil:l:ai (Schalk and A¯ l:va¯pil:lai Ve¯luppil:l:ai 2002, pp. 167–203), which includes a section on literature (Schalk & A¯ l:va¯pil:lai Ve¯luppil:l:ai 2002, pp. 196–202), but is strongest on the epigraphic side. Other than these three works, related works include: Radha Champakalakshmy’s article, which elaborates political aspects and ahim: sa¯ in Jain literature in Tamil (Champakalakshmy 1994), Vincent Sekhar’s, which is half survey, half commentary on doxology in the Nı¯lake¯ci (Sekhar 2009), Jyoti Prasad Jain’s list of authors and works (Jain 1985), and Baida’s short overview Jain tamil sa¯hitya, in his work dedicated mainly to Jain doctrine in the Kur- al: (Baida 1987, pp. 1–31). None of these, however, add either new data or new perspectives to the discussion, or anything significant to Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s literary history. 50 The only time his full name is mentioned is in the title of a short biography of the author added to the 1974 second edition by Ramesh (Chakravarti 1974, xxi). Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s earlier publications feature his complete name, usually written as one, i.e. Chakravartinayanar. One might speculate about how much this omission may have been due to the practice of author profiling on the pan-Indian book market. 123 624 C. Emmrich appointments at the Government Colleges at Rajahmundry, Madras, and at the Government College in Kumbakonam, where he held the position of Principal from 1938 and from which he retired. He is best known within Jain Studies as one of the pioneers in academic research on South Indian and Digambara Jain literature.51 He was the first, in 1920, to translate into English the Pañca¯stika¯yasa¯ra (Chakravartinayanar 1920) of Kundakunda, according to tradition the founder of the South Indian Dra¯vid:aSangha,_ whose dates range from the traditionally assumed first century to the more iconoclastically proposed eight century (Upadhye 1964, xxii vs. Dhaky 1991, p. 190). Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r prefaced it with a rich introduction into Digambara cosmographical and ontological scholasticism, and sup- plemented the Jaina Sáurasenı¯ Pra¯krit su¯tras with his own English commentary. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s English commentary of Kundakunda’s other main treatise, the Samayasa¯ra (Chakravarti 1971), based on Amr:tacandra’s Sanskrit commentary, appeared only in 1971, also with the Arrah publisher. Though Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r was a towering figure in the Madras academic landscape, he was (despite being mentioned as ‘‘a prominent member of the Jain community’’52 by M.S. Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r, the author of the first monograph on Jainism in the Tamil-speaking region) much better known for his lectures on Western philosophy and his translations and editions of works of Tamil literature. These included the Nı¯lake¯ci (Chakravarti 1994) and Me¯rumantarapura¯n: am (Chakravarti 1923), as well as his 1949 edition of the Kur- al: (Chakravarti 1951b) with commentary and introduction. He is less well known for his explicitly Jain profile, which he sharpened through his Arrah publications and frequent lectures, particularly on ahim: sa¯, within the S´veta¯mbara circles of Bombay. In fact, it is under the patronage of the Jain pub- lishers Bha¯ratı¯ya Jnã¯napı¯t:ha, Delhi, and not a Tamil Nadu institution, that Jaina Literature in Tamil was reprinted in 1974. What makes Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s core text unique is that, among other things, it is a study on Jain literature in Tamil written by a Jain. It would be misguided to expect this work, presupposing that a Jain would inevitably produce a Jain literary history, to show us what a Jain literary history should look like. However, it might be productive to ask how such a literary history presents the Jain in history, and whether this is different from or congruent with the ways we have already seen. This might help us understand who its author is, namely, the degree to which he may or may not consider himself a Jain, and the degree to which he may or may not be talking about himself and his own education. When he talks about the Jains in literary history, it is interesting to see which texts he prioritizes and how he reads them. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s text itself provides almost no explicit hints as to which modern academic scholarship it may be indebted. In keeping with the style of academic publications of that time, the entire text, at least in its 1941 edition, does

51 We know from a biographical note by H.L. Jain and A.N. Upadhye, based on information provided by Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s grandson Thiru V. Jaya Vijayan, that our author went through his academic training in Madras, receiving his M.A. from the Christian College in 1905 and his L.T in 1909 from the Teacher’s College. He taught at the Wesley Girls’ School in the same city until 1910, switching for at least a year to an administrative position at the Accountant General’s Office before embarking on his scholarly career (Chakravarti 1971, pp. 5–6). 52 As recognized by Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r in his 1922 publication (Ramaswami Ayyangar 1922, p. 43). 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 625 away with footnotes or bibliography, providing merely an index compiled by the prominent scholar of Jainism, Adinath Neminath Upadhye. As a literary history published in 1941, one might expect its author to have been aware of Ka. Sup- priramaniya Pillai’s 1930 Ilakkiya varala¯-ru and maybe also Mar-aimalai At:ikal:’s Ma¯n: ikkava¯cakar varala¯-rum ka¯lamum of the same year, both with their strong focus on religious periodization and the role attributed to the Jains. He may also have known M.S. Pu¯rn: alinkam_ Pil::lai’s A Primer of Tamil Literature, published in 1904 yet still influential at that time, which, as we have seen, treats the Jains as little more than reformed Hindus. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r completed his schooling in the first decade of the century, before Pu¯rn: alinkam Pil::lai’s work began to shape the curricula of Tamil literature, which might suggest that the work of the former may have been more critically aware of influential text rather than integrally formed by it. Apart from the names of editors of individual works, which we will look at below, among which U. Ve¯. Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar features prominently, and apart from the few British scholars he mentions,53 the two Tamil literary historians he refers to at all are Es. Vaiya¯puri Pil::lai and K.N. Civara¯ja Pil::lai. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r briefly refers to Vaiya¯puri Pil::lai (Chakravarti 1974, p. 22) with regard to the one assertion that was to earn that latter not only a special place among those who advocated a stronger, if not crucial place for the Jains in Tamil literary history, but also the criticism of later generations of scholars and activists: that the To¯lka¯ppiyam and the Kur- al: were written by Jains. The brevity of the reference speaks of how Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r positioned his text within a larger discussion in which he could place himself, or let himself be placed, without doing much of the arguing himself. At the time of the book’s publication, Vaiya¯puri Pil::lai was the head of the Department of Tamil at Madras University (1938–1946) and was spearheading a new wave of Tamil literary history that applied rigorous philological methods and advocated giving closer attention to the indebtedness of Tamil literature to Sanskrit (Sivathamby 1986, p. 54 79). Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r, by assuming Sanskrit templates for Tamil Jain works, though not arguing in favor of a consistent line to be taken regarding Jain works, does signal thereby his proximity to Vaiya¯puri Pil::lai’s position. Unsurprisingly for a literary history of that period, Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s work refers rarely to works by historians of Tamil Nadu. K.N. Civara¯ja Pil::lai’s 1932 Chronology of the Early Tamils is referred to twice in the early parts dealing with the Cankam_ period, while as it progresses the study focuses increasingly on literary documents. For the academic research in Jainism, his main reference point may have been the above- mentioned pioneering 1922 Studies in South Indian Jainism by M.S. Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r,55 although the relationship between this and his own work, two decades later, is far from transparent and may require a brief, closer look.

53 Burnell on the To¯lka¯ppiyam (Chakravarti 1974, p. 21), Pope on the Kur-al: (Chakravarti 1974, pp. 30, 39), and Logan on Jainism on the Malabar (Chakravarti 1974, p. 61). 54 Such as the Ya¯pperunkalakk_ a¯rikai, which the author goes so far as to consider a translation (Chak- ravarti 1974, pp. 127–128). 55 Ramaswami Ayyangar (1922). In effect, this reads more like a collection of individual studies. It was partially written, rewritten, completed or redacted in the summer recess of 1921 at the Maharajah’s College in Vijayanagaram, Andhra Pradesh. The second volume, by B. Seshagiri Rao, which was written and compiled at the same time in the same place, deals with Jainism in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. 123 626 C. Emmrich

Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r’s work, which claims ‘‘to trace the history of a people’’ (Ramaswami Ayyangar 1922, i), is mainly a cultural-historical work covering the history of the Jains in the Tamil-speaking region: from the origins of ‘‘the Jain sect’’ in Northeast India (Chap. 1), the ‘‘Jain Migration to the South’’ (Chap. 2), the ‘‘Jains in the Tamil Land’’ before the rise of bhakti (Chap. 3), the ‘‘Period of Saiva Na¯yana¯rs and Vaishnava Alvars’’ (Chap. 4), to the ‘‘Modern Period’’ (Chap. 5), which concludes the chronological section.56 Chapter 6 is dedicated to the ‘‘Jains and Tamil Literature’’ (Ramaswami Ayyangar 1922, pp. 81–104) and, if taken as an autonomous piece, is the direct predecessor of Jaina Literature in Tamil.57 Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r begins this chapter with a discussion of periodization models and, as referred to above, concludes that only the genre model is useful, since it does not reduce Jain literature to a speciﬁc period (Ramaswami Ayyangar 1922, p. 89). The genres he lists however are reduced to two, the ‘‘didactic’’ and the ‘‘ka¯vyas,’’ yet the separation seems rather to be following the canonical grouping of certain texts (Cankam_ and non-Cankam;_ major and minor ka¯vyas). Apart from a general interest in historically relating literary texts to political events, two things are additionally striking in Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r’s account: ﬁrst, the condensation of the works he focuses on to doctrinal contents listed in bullet-point format,58 and secondly, the reproduction of the plot of the Cı¯vakacinta¯man: i by means of an extensive quote from Pu¯rn: alinkam_ Pil::lai (Ramaswami Ayyangar 1922, pp. 98–100). He concludes, with a lament, that so many texts are still unavailable, i.e. ‘‘buried in the archives of Matams,’’ although ‘‘enlightened South Indian Jains’’ may help to change that (Ramaswami Ayyangar 1922, p. 10). Ra¯maca¯mi Aiyanka_ ¯r’s text, in all its pioneering power, is a work that clearly sees Jain literature as a resource that the community of Tamil researchers must access in order to write a history of the Tamil people, including the history of the loss which can only be recuperated in scholarship. This is nowhere as tangible as in the concluding passages of the chapter just prior to the one on the Jains and Tamil literature, which deals with the history of the Jains in the ‘‘Modern Period.’’ While it is remarkable that the author even concedes to a modern-day presence of Jains in the Tamil-speaking region, naming places and demographics (Ramaswami Ayyangar 1922, pp. 74, 78–79), it should come as no surprise that the picture he paints is utterly desolate: ‘‘The majority of these scattered remnants are poor cultivators, ignorant, illiterate and all unconscious of the noble history and spacious traditions of their fathers’’ (Ramaswami Ayyangar 1922, p. 79). If one combines the derogatory value of such a statement with the fact that in 1922, and not just then, it could have equally well been applied to the general

56 The book deals separately with the ‘‘Jains in the Deccan’’ (Chap. 7) and the ‘‘Sangam Age’’ (Chap. 8), the latter chapter being a contribution to chronology and dating debates surrounding Cankam_ literature, which were central to Tamil literary historiography at that time, rather than to the study of Jainism. 57 Its immediate successor is E.S. Varatara¯c Aiyar’s 1957 Tamil ilakkiya varala¯:ru. Caman: a pautta vain: ava ilakkiyam (Varatara¯c Aiyar 1957), which resulted from an Annamalai University literary history project. Civatampi comprehensively critiques the design of the entire project, which has one volume for Sáiva literature and another one for the rest (excluding Christian and Muslim literature), as heavily hampered by a Sáiva bias (Sivathamby 1986, p. 84). 58 Cı¯vakacinta¯man: i: Ramaswami Ayyangar (1922, pp. 94–95); Nı¯lake¯cı¯: Ramaswami Ayyangar (1922, p. 102). 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 627 populace of the Madras Presidency, then the Jain individuals and communities whom a modernizing Brahminical e´lite reduced to the trusted caretakers of their new and glorious Tamil past did not stand a chance to measure up to the standards applied to them in observations such as these. As in all colonialist discourse, so here too it requires the colonizer to rupture the links between the colonized and their traditions, in order to marginalize the one and appropriate the other. The emotional state that blurs these lines of agency best is melancholy, as expressed in the musing: ‘‘[i]t is, indeed, sad to reflect that, beyond the lingering legends in secluded spots and the wayside statues of her saints and martyrs, Jainism in the south has left little to testify’’ (Ramaswami Ayyangar 1922, pp. 79–80). It would take about two decades after the publication of Studies in South Indian Jainism for Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r to be able to testify to the contrary. As if he had set out to reverse his predecessor’s narrative, eloquently not mentioning his work with a single word, for Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r the Jains have their own history, are much less glorified and are still amongst the Tamils, only in other ways than we might imagine. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s Jaina Literature in Tamil, perhaps a little surprisingly, begins as an essay on the origins of ahim: sa¯ in Vedic religion. It is a history of the conflict between the supporters of sacrifice and its critics from the Sam: hita¯s to the Upanis:ads (Chakravarti 1974, pp. 1–8), and the emergence of Jainism from ahim: sa¯- obeying, Pra¯krit-speaking ks:atriyas hailing from Eastern India. This group takes the rule of not-harming more seriously than their eccentric, fellow anti-sacrifice East- erners, the Buddhists (Chakravarti 1974, pp. 8, 34–35). In addition to the obvious inter-textuality with Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s lectures and publications, this section presents the author as being part of that late nineteenth/early twentieth century modernist movement, particularly found among the lay Jain community, of homogenizing and theorizing Jainism as, to use the words of Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s 1957 publication, the ‘‘Religion of Ahim: sa¯’’. Also characteristic is the historical agenda of drawing clear lines between the Jains and the Buddhists, as inspired by Hermann Jacobi, and extending the historical lineage back in time in order to claim historical seniority. More striking, however, is Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s interest in detecting ambivalent features of sacrifice in the Sam: hita¯s and Bra¯hman: as, identifying the names of tı¯rthankara_ s such as R: s:abha and Aris::tanemi in the R: gveda (Chakravarti 1974, p. 2), and generally a tendency to avoid elaborating the oppo- sitional character of the relationship between Brahmanism and Jainism. The latter was all-pervasive in Western and Indian academic scholarship on Jainism and Buddhism of that day, and was articulated strongly in twentieth century S´veta¯mbara polemics. The author does not develop this position further, but it is in these passages, which are the least factual, that his ideology seems to come to the fore most directly. What these passages reveal is his unfailing reluctance to embark in religiously motivated polemics concerning Tamil literature, either in terms of Brahmanical domination, Jain subjection, or the political, social, or even literary- historical implications of either. This does not mean that Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s literary historical claims are not political statements, but they do not align themselves with other ideological fights of twentieth century Tamil Nadu, as retraced by the literary histories examined above. His political stance is revealed by the stances he decides not to take. 123 628 C. Emmrich

In a second step, the book deals with the issue of the ‘‘migration’’ of the Jains to South India, which includes a complex of questions concerning who went where when, and how they dealt with those who were already there. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r relativizes the account of Bhadraba¯hu’s migration to S´ra¯van: a Bel:agol:a and further south as secondary to earlier settlements of Jains in Tamil Nadu, which occurred sometime prior to the fourth century BCE. He does this in one of the very few references in his book to inscriptional evidence. It was characteristic at that time for the dominant function of epigraphic studies being to produce hard and fast dates to develop a grid upon which undated events, biographic and textual data, as well as more generally historical narratives could be projected. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r uses this tool only at the beginning of his work, where he deals with the beginnings of Jain presence in the Tamil-speaking region (Chakravarti 1974, p. 12). We will see below, when considering the reworking of the volume by the epigraphist K.V. Ramesh, the casual and indeed inaccurate way that Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r claims the inscriptions to say things they do not, such as certain rulers being in fact Jains in order to support an early dating. He follows K.N. Civara¯ja Pil::lai (Chakravarti 1974, p. 14) and others in assuming that the Jains and the Buddhists were the first ‘‘Aryans’’ to arrive in the Tamil land, later joined by ‘‘the Hindu Aryans [who] were the last to come’’ (Sivaraja Pillai 1997, quoted by Chakravarti 1974, p. 14). With regard to a potential opposition and the literary results that may have been generated by this encounter, Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r follows Civara¯ja Pil::lai, who writes about how the Jains ‘‘finding in the Tamil land no Brahmanic religion on any scale to oppose had to contend [sic] themselves with the composition of works mostly ethical and literary.’’ He continues to quote Civara¯ja Pil::lai, in the style of the generously long quotes of the time: ‘‘The Tamils too seem to have taken themselves readily to this impulse which ran in the direction of their national bent, and the [according to Civara¯ja Pil::lai’s periodization] second period accordingly was throughout ethical and literary in substance and tone and seems to have ushered in by the writing of such works as the Kur-al: and the Tolka¯ppiyam, etc.’’ (Sivaraja Pillai 1997, quoted by Chakravarti 1974, p. 14). This passage contains a number of implications, including certain mentalities attributed to the pre-A¯ ryanized Tamils, the Jains identified as the non-Brahmans’ first contact with the A¯ ryan world, and Jain religious features, particularly certain doctrinal texts, and particularly those considered ‘‘very Jain,’’ which developed primarily out of the dynamics of their opposition to Brahmanism. This implies that had the Jains been left to themselves and to the wholesome influence of the Tamils, their literature would have remained about good deeds and beauty throughout, precluding doctrinal hair-splitting and religious polemics. This, already familiar from the roles attributed to the Jains in the Tamil literary histories viewed above, is presented by Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r without drawing the slightest conclusion or further generalization, without picking up any larger issue concerning which groups may have been interacting, which influences might have produced what, and how religious doctrines, mentalities and immigra- tion waves may be put together to form a historical narrative, periodized or not. He does not even pick up the reference to the second period, let alone an explicit ideology. Instead, he merely continues by adding a note on the reference to Pra¯krit, featuring pa¯katam or pa¯hatam as being ‘‘current in all countries’’ (ella¯ na¯:t:tilum 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 629 iyalvadu)(Centamil: VIII, 1909–1910, p. 471 quoted in Chakravarti 1974, p. 18, n. 1.). He sees this as a sign of the early presence of a pan-South-Indian (?), pan- Indian (?), or to push it a bit further, ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ continuity representing the East Indian ahim: sa¯ tradition. This was both pervasive and early, and created an imagined Jain world. An expression of the claims to being early and pervasive in the light-treading historical account given by Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r, somehow flying below the radar of periodization, is the way he again quotes Civara¯ja Pil::lai when opening his literary history. Dealing with the Cankam_ literature as the foundational ‘‘Period,’’ with a capital p, of Tamil literary historiography, he quotes Civara¯ja Pil::lai as saying that ‘‘[i]t was the sacerdotal ‘Sangam’_ of the early Jains that most probably supplied the orthodox party with a clue for the story of a literary Sangam_ of their own on that model’’ (Sivaraja Pillai 1997, p. 27, quoted by Chakravarti 1974, p. 14). According to this reading, the much later non-Jains uncovered a term, used from early on by the Jains for their religious institutions, to designate a literature that they, i.e. these non-Jains, would regard as primordially Tamil. Hence, despite its Jain name, here it is disclaimed that it was the Jains who produced this literature or that they had an active part in its literary-historical construction. Rather, the Jains played a basically passive part by allowing the appropriation of one of their terms by others, who used it to describe a literature that was supposedly even pre-Jain, and thus unequivocably Tamil. It is not imbued with Jain meaning, but is worked into the texture of the making of Tamil history by supplying the threads for the weaving of that very texture. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r offers more examples of this kind, which work in analogous if reverse ways, such as the Tamil designation of vegetarian food as saivam, the Tamil word for a follower of Síva, implying a linguistic trace of practitioners of vegetarianism being converted, hence converted Jains (Chakravarti 1974, pp. 136–137).59 Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r then proceeds in a fashion that he will carry on through the rest of his study: discussions about individual pieces of literature and their authors. He begins with the Tolka¯ppiyam, which periodizing literary histories have positioned as the very oldest example of Tamil literature. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r places it in the ‘‘second Sangam_ period’’ (Chakravarti 1974, p. 25). He continues with the Kur- al:, which in periodizing narratives follows directly. They also endowed it with all the weight placed on texts considered both early and of great cultural-political importance. Paradigmatic of Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s presentation is his claim that its author is not Tiruval::luvar, but E¯ la¯ca¯riyar (Chakravarti 1974, p. 30), which is another name for Kundakunda, author of the Pra¯krit verses of the Pañca¯stika¯yasa¯ra

59 This notion is extremely popular. I have witnessed it being brought up regularly as a topos in contemporary conversational references to the Jain presence in ‘‘Tamil culture.’’ Another trace of this kind, which I found mentioned in interviews, may be Cakravarti’s own caste name Na¯yan-- a¯r, which in North and South Arcot, like Mutaliyar in Tan˜ca¯vu¯r, Cet:t:iyar in Kumpako¯n: am, and Aiyar in Ka¯n˜cipuram (Schalk and A¯ l:va¯pil:l:ai Ve¯luppil:l:ai 2002, p. 167), is a name highly common among Tamil Digambaras, though it refers also to the Tamil Sáiva bhakti saints. This obscures the fact that it is explained as deriving from the designation of a local chief, without bearing any sectarian affiliation (personal communication by Sanjay Subrahmaniam). 123 630 C. Emmrich and Samayasa¯ra mentioned above. The diverging discussions about the religious 60 affiliation of the Kur- al: are well known (e.g. Gopalan 1979, pp. 43–61). It will come as no surprise that here, Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r is an exponent of the camp that maintains its Jain background, as he also does for the more consensually Jain Na¯lat:iya¯r. Again, as in the case of the understated endorsement of Vaiya¯puri Pil::lai, the claims to Jain authorship are made, if at all explicitly, as if it is based on the title of the work. He does not enter or even refer to the larger debate, which may be in line with another observation made by the author. In his 1936 introduction to his annotated summary of the Nı¯lake¯ci, regarding the doctrinal contents he felt strongest about, he reveals much by writing, with regard to ahim: sa¯: ‘‘Where is the difference between the Jainas and the others? What is the differentiating mark of the Jainas on account of which they keep themselves aloof from others and the others in their turn consider them different from and rival to themselves. [sic] It is extremely difficult to 61 answer this question’’ (Chakravarti 1936, pp. 25–26). Discarding ahim: sa¯, as such, as the hallmark of Jainism, Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r proposes that, ‘‘[t]heir intellectual rigourism and moral puritanism are the only difference’’.62 While on one hand, the terms ‘‘rigourism’’ and ‘‘puritanism’’ suggest philosophical and religious categories that both remind us of the author’s Western academic training, which made him prioritize Jain scholastic texts, and think of Jainism (like Buddhism) as a protestant reformatory movement, on the other hand, his take on what makes doctrinal content Jain is important and differs from previous literature. For him, it is not so much a specific doctrinal content that marks the Jain, but rather the form of his doctrine and the degree of his moral claims. It is a form and degree that ‘‘would never appeal to ordinary masses,’’ and thus, according to this 1936 text, the Jains experienced a ‘‘loss of influence in Southern India’’ (Chakravarti 1936, p. 26). His 1941 text, in contrast, conspicuously avoids engaging in the issue of decline, and, as we shall see, instead of pointing at the Jains’ absence and the reasons for it, the point of this work seems to be to remind subtly us of their presence. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r then proceeds to briefly examine the so-called 18 didactic poems, which continue the generic literary narrative begun with the Kur- al:. The study then introduces the next grouping as that of the so-called five major ka¯vyas and five minor ka¯vyas (Chakravarti 1974, pp. 48–110) and describes those that are still extant and clearly of, according to the author, Jain affiliation. Of the five major ka¯vyas, he singles out the Cilappatika¯ram and the Civakacinta¯mani, elaborating their content at great length. He then works himself through the plotlines (more so

60 For references to critics of a Jaina affiliation, see Cutler (2003, p. 294, n. 52); for an excellent summary of some of these discussions, as well as a bibliography on the topic, see Takahashi (2009a, pp. 1–2). As referred to earlier, Stuart Blackburn has, through this example, successfully problematized Tamil literary historiography (Blackburn 2000). Cutler has linked the relevance (or irrelevance in his case) of the question of sectarian affiliation to the presence (in this case absence) of sectarian polemics (Cutler 2003, p. 292). Would it be permissible to generalize this stance and interpret Cutler’s comment as going as far as saying that the question of Jain (and possibly also be true for more generally ‘‘religious’’) affiliation only plays a role in texts that are polemical? 61 Also referred to by Takahashi (2009a, p. 2, n. 12), with whose skeptical position this admission chimes in well. 62 Chakravarti (1936, p. 26); also referred to there as ‘‘logical consistency and ethical puritanism’’. 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 631 than the doctrinal contents) of the five minor ka¯vya s as well, including the Nı¯lake¯ci. The canonical ka¯vya section is followed by a description of individual ka¯vya works that have hagiographical narratives more generally pura¯n: ic or more narrowly Jain. These includes Konkuve_ ¯l:ir’s Perunkatai_ (Chakravarti 1974, pp. 110–118), which is traditionally seen as connected to Gun: a¯dhya’s Br:hatkatha¯ and is probably a Tamil reworking of a Sanskrit version by the poet Durvinı¯ta. They also include Va¯man-- a Mun-- ivar’s Me¯rumantarapura¯n: am (Chakravarti 1974, pp. 118–126) and the text most popular among Jain communities in Tamil Nadu today, the S´rı¯pura¯n: am (Chakravarti 1974, pp. 126–127), written in Jain Man: iprava¯l:am and derived from the Maha¯pura¯n: a. This work, in turn, processes the same kind of materials found in the S´veta¯mbara Tris:as::tisála¯kapurus:acarita. The author then examines two works on prosody (Amr:tasa¯gara’s twin Ya¯pperunkalakka_ ¯rikai and Ya¯pperunkalavirutti_ ) and three works on grammar (Gun: avı¯ra’s Ne¯mina¯tham, Pavanantimuni’s Nan-- --nu¯l and Na¯r-kavira¯ca’s Akapporul:vil:akkam), mentions the three major lexicographical works or nikan::tus (Diva¯kara’s lost Diva¯kara-,Pingala’s_ Pingala-_ and Man::talapurucaÕs Cu¯:la¯man: inikan::tu), and then ends his survey by touching upon two devotional poems (the ¯ Tirunu¯-r-ranta¯ti by Aviro¯dhi A:lva¯r and the Tirukkalambagam by Utı¯citeva; Chakravarti 1974, pp. 127–135). The specifically literary-historical section of the work ends with short paragraph mentioning the scientific works (the En: cuvat:i, a text on arithmetic, and the Jine¯ntirama¯lai, a text on astrology; Chakravarti 1974, pp. 127–135), before the author adds a concluding paragraph, which we will look at below. There is no indi- cation where, in historically narrated time, the reader has been left at this point in the narrative. No event is mentioned, no date with which this history ends, no single ‘‘last’’ or ‘‘most recent’’ ‘‘big’’ work, no further assessment on the fate of the literary production by Jains in Tamil Nadu, not to mention a concluding realignment with a particular model of periodization or larger narrative of the Tamil-speaking region. Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s treatment of literature contrasts sharply with that of the literary historians discussed above. Firstly, if one takes the title Jaina Literature in Tamil seriously, it is primarily a literature of Jain texts, not Tamil texts. If it is about Tamil texts at all, it is not so in the sense of a larger Tamil identity, community, country, or nation. It is not about the ‘‘Tamil Jains’’ or ‘‘Tamil Jainism,’’ and not even about the ‘‘Jains of Tamil Nadu’’, but of texts transmitted in a particular language, i.e. Tamil, just as others were transmitted in Pra¯krit, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Hindi etc. But in contrast, these are considered to be both classical, regional and representative of the South, which in itself, of course, refers back, albeit only obliquely, to larger issues the title remains cautious about. As we will see below, the work is difficult to compare with the other literary histories discussed above, because its audience is interested primarily in things Jain, not in things Tamil. When compared to the highly structured works of his colleagues, or the powerful structures proposed, if not always reflected, in their narratives, it is remarkable in not being divided into chapters. It consists only of untitled, non-numerated paragraphs, with the discussion of the texts flowing along for 137 pages, including plot sum- maries for most of them. Apart from the question of when the Jains may have

123 632 C. Emmrich arrived in Tamil Nadu, the author does not seem to be interested in dating at all,63 and seems to grow even less interested as his exposition proceeds, leaving the reader without any idea of how to chronologically or historically place the works mentioned in the latter half of the narrative. He neither proposes a consistent periodization model of his own, nor does the structure of his work explicitly follow any of those of his predecessors. One could take this as, with Zvelebil, a reflection of the ‘‘nominalistic’’ view that ‘‘a period is anyhow a mere conventional label for any section of time to be described, an arbitrary super-imposition on a material in flux’’ (Zvelebil 1992, p. 12). But the text is not consistent enough for this. We also cannot exclude, as we shall see, other motives behind his refusal to endorse one model or another, or to propose one of his own. There are only traces of periods, which again are more discernible in the early sections of his work. Most explicitly, when dealing with the Kur- al: and the Na¯lat:iya¯r, he states that ‘‘[T]he classification of Tamil literature into three distinct periods, viz., natural, ethical and religious suggested by Mr. Civara¯ja Pil::lai may be taken as convenient frame-work, since it broadly rep- resents the historical developments of Tamil literature’’ (Chakravarti 1974, p. 27; Sivaraja Pillai 1997, pp. 8–10 quoted by Chakravarty 1974, p. 27, n. 2). Civara¯ja Pil::lai’s 1932 Chronology of the Early Tamils presents this model, which seems to be derived from and best suited for an inquiry into the earliest literary documents. It presents a triadic periodization, with an ethical period clearly centered around the Kur- al:, as the ethical work par excellence, framed by a preceding natural and a subsequent, final religious period. It opens with a hazy past, which includes the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Decades, all the supposedly lost first Cankam_ texts and whatever antediluvian Tamil literature one may project back to the times of the mythical Tamil continent Kuma¯rı¯ka¯n::tam. It then offers a third period of religious literature from the Kur- al: onwards, basically stopping short of any sort of attempt to periodize what most literary historians have struggled with, i.e. pretty much all remaining Tamil literature. Needless to say, this model is not particularly handy for a further periodization of that Jain literature that qualifies as both religious and post- Kur- al:. And it hence comes as no surprise that after this short, if grand, appearance, this model is not referred to again. There are several aspects about it, however, that reveal Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s approach to working himself through his material. Firstly, it avoids a periodization that would isolate Jain literature, confining it to a certain period and denying it its coevalness (Fabian 2002). Jain literature can be part of that generous, if under-defined, realm of a ‘‘religious period,’’ in which one may or may not draw sectarian literary lines. Secondly, by creating an open space rather than a definite place for Jainism in this open-ended third phase, this model is actually a genre model in which periods are defined by the predominance of certain, admittedly broad, genre categories: texts about nature, texts about conduct, texts about religion. And indeed, the grouping of texts according to generic, topical and formal affinity (ka¯vya, pura¯n: a, nikan::tu, stotra as well as, literally, ‘‘miscellaneous works,’’ Chakravarti 1974, p. 134) is the most consistent organizational principle found in Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s work. It allows him the space to let the other two

63 The few exceptions are the sections on the earliest literature and occasional estimates (e.g. Chakravarti 1974, p. 129). 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 633 principles—the pre-periodizing, so to speak, organizational principles discussed above—structure the presentation: the conventional grouping of texts (the 18 didactic works, the 2 · 5 ka¯vyas, the 2 pura¯n: as, the 3 nighan::tus: Diva¯kara, Pingala_ , Cu¯d:a¯man: i) and the attribution of Jain authors’ names and backgrounds to specific titles. Frequent references to the importance of certain texts within these groups for the training of Jains in monastic schools (e.g. Chakravarti 1974, p. 130), and comments on the complementarity of the fields these groups of texts cover point to the fact that many of these lists may reflect curricula Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r was familiar with. They are hence much more likely to document the pragmatic-peda- gogical provenance of the arrangement and presentation of these texts as a form sanctioned by a particular network of institutions and teacher-student lineages at a certain point in time, and in a particular place, mainly in North and South Arcot and Cenkalpat_ ::tu. This is in lieu of a historical process, based on either the creation of these reading lists or the genealogies, permutations and consolidations of the texts themselves. With this in mind, one might be less surprised by the nearly (e.g. Chakravarti 1974, p. 128) complete absence of references to the rich, as yet undocumented, let alone edited commentarial literature in Man: iprava¯l: am on the listed texts.64 At the cusp between a layperson’s reading list and an academically conceived literary history, the position of the commentaries would necessarily remain unclear, possibly due to the difficulty in defining, on these shifting grounds, the conventions of their use, authority and accessibility, or even their role in creating the canon. John Cort, building on work by Kendall W. Folkert, has been the first to give us a deeper view into such a layperson’s curriculum, as listed by the S´veta¯mbara Muni Jambu¯vijayjı¯. Cort describes it as ‘‘a reading list that would tell a lay Jain what he or she needs to know, both to perform a number of key Jain rituals and to understand the cosmological, theological, and philosophical assumptions that underlie those rituals’’ (Cort 2004, p. 399). More research on such lay readings among the Tamil Jains would allow us to localize, both historically and with regard to place, Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s list more precisely. It would also help us clarify how much of the lists he presents may, on one hand, go back to identifiable Digambara Jain communities, or, on the other, how much of them has already been mediated by the academic canonization produced by the ‘‘Tamil Renaissance.’’ It is the latter question that is being touched on in Folkert’s and Cort’s work, when they point at the discrepancies between their S´veta¯mbara reading list and the lists of ‘‘canonical’’ texts produced by the synergies of Indological scholarship and traditional Jain practices of canonization (Cort 2004, pp. 407–409; more generally Folkert 1993). Periodization and dating may hence be forms of representation that simply do not lend themselves to the practices Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s work sets out to map. Indeed,

64 Besides the only commentarial text mentioned by Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r, the Ya¯pparunkalavirutti_ , important examples of the enormous, yet elided, domain of Jain literature in Man: iprava¯l:am that have been so edited so far, to name just a few, are Ciripa¯lavarn: i’s Tattva¯rthasu¯tram tamil vya¯khya¯nam, as the title says, a commentary on Uma¯svati’s Tattva¯rthasu¯tra, the Pañcato¯ttiram tamilur-ai (also known as the Pañcasto- tra), and the Pattama¯rkato¯ttiram tamilur-ai, both commentaries on Ma¯natunka’s_ Bhaktama¯rga, with the former covering four more Sanskrit texts (for a select bibliography, see Joseph 1997, pp. 332–233). 123 634 C. Emmrich it is not a story, but a map. This is why its literary historical core does not present a narrative ending, but simply stops at one of its many self-drawn rims. It does not set out to answer the question when the Jaina literary productivity ended, a productivity that all the other literary histories try to plot, and what the suggested absence of Jaina literary production post-seventeenth century may mean. This work is not about using Jain material to give a narrative rhythm and trajectory to the larger flow of Tamil literature, but assessing and identifying what Jain material can be retrieved as such. It is more about salvaging than about commemorating. And yet, having come to this preliminary conclusion, we may be able to turn it around as we become more aware of what kind of presentation we are looking at. This depends on which edition of his work we have before us, and on whether we are talking about, as we have been doing so far, a text written and ‘‘authorized’’ by the author. The text precludes, as we have seen above, the reader a view into its own genealogical past according to standard academic forms, by omitting notes and bibliography. Ironically, at a later point, this is augmented by references to texts to which it may (or could) have referred, as well as some that were written on the topics it covers only after its publication. The Mysore-based epigraphist K.V. Ramesh, referring to the process leading up to his 1974 re-editing of Jaina Literature in Tamil, notes in his introduction that the prominent scholar of Jainism A.N. Upadhye had ‘‘felt that the work, published more than three decades ago, would be much useful as a source book if it is made up-to-date and if necessary references are provided.’’ In following this advice, Ramesh writes of himself: ‘‘I have not merely confined myself to those source books which the late Professor might have consulted at the time of writing this book but have also referred to subsequent publications.’’ Further, he writes: ‘‘I have also given detailed information in the footnotes on some works, not mentioned by the author, which had subsequently been decided upon as the creations of Jaina authors’’ (Chakravarti 1974, xviii). Following a practice not uncommon in modern South Indian literary history,65 in the footnotes its later editor presents us the original text with all the additions. It is this 1974 version of Jain Literature in Tamil that is circulated today and one finds in libraries. It is the edition that is quoted by scholars, not the 1941 version, and thus, when referring to it, it is not clear whether one quotes Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r rightly or wrongly. We shall come to the question of what this means for questions of the textual identity, authorship and Rezeptionsgeschichte of this work further below, when examining what the rupture embodied by the line separating the main text from the footnotes means for the text as a whole. At this point, it might be useful to stress that while Ramesh extends and supplements Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s effort, also in the light of the issues of literary historiography discussed above, his notes and references do in no way change or relativize, and rather reinforce the kind of historiography Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r was producing. It is important to be aware of this process, because if one views the composition of Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s text as stretching from 1941 to 1974, in its later and more well-known form, by no means

65 Cf. Ti.Po. Mı¯n-- a¯t:cicuntaran-- ’s notes on Chitty’s The Tamil Plutarch (Chitty 1859), printed in bold in the 1946 reprint. 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 635 does Jain Literature in Tamil have a shortage of dates attributed to texts. These, however, are not found as a part of the author’s argument, but in the editor’s footnotes; the dates are not those of the texts’ composition by individual Jain authors, but those of the first, and subsequent printed editions, translations, commentaries by modern Tamil scholars. Ramesh’s supplementation of dates and other bibliographic data shows quite clearly that the use of dating is not exclusively periodization or chronology, but it can also be used, simply and more pragmatically, for reference. It turns Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s literary history, which identifies Jain texts, into a document of the incredible amount of work done between the late 1860s and late 1930s in transferring the textual corpora of Tamil literature from palm leaf manuscripts to printed books. The bulk of this work was done in the 1880s. The literary historical narrative that Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r develops is based on a massive enterprise of literary criticism, which Ramesh’s apparatus helps to define. On some occasions, Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r himself points to this important editorial work, which made available texts such as U.Ve. Ca¯mina¯taiyar’s groundbreaking 1887 edition of the Cı¯vakacinta¯man: i,orA¯ rumuka Na¯valar’s monumental edition (1867– - 66 1880) of the commentary on the lexicographical work Cu¯:la¯man: inikan::tu. But again, instead of being an account of that historical enterprise as such, Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s presentation, in its curricular approach and form, finds its strength in expanding on, further developing and, in the work of Ramesh, transfiguring the arrangement of traditional curricular lists into something more along the lines of an annotated bibliography. It translates the orally transmitted lists of orally transmitted texts, in which manuscripts and manuscript holdings, as well as recitations on the basis of manuscripts, played a central role (Cutler 2003, pp. 286, 292), into a narrative that, self-aware, retains a perspective from within a particular literary tradition, be it a religious tradition or a literary tradition shared by a religious community. It further elaborates these lists in order to present the availability of these texts in their multiple editions, with their multiple introductions and modern commentaries, and the traces left by the manuscripts on which they were based, not to the monastic student, but to the academic scholar dealing with printed (sometimes critical) editions. On the whole, this is a twofold enterprise: giving orientation amidst a dramatically and rapidly changing scene of fundamentally altered practices of transmission, and grasping the opportunity to pull curricula, texts and a whole literature of curricular reading practices into the bright light of urban, modern scholarship and regional and national prestige. In a way, Ramesh’s refashioning of Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s text attempts to complete this process. However, in doing so the text is altered significantly. Ramesh does two things: First, he supplies the necessary formal conditions for it to be

66 ¯ ¯ A-rumuka Na¯valar 2005. Ca¯mina¯t Aiyar (Chakravarti 1974, pp. 49, 83, 130), A-rumuka Na¯valar (Chakravarti 1974, p. 133); see also T. Venkatara¯ma Aiyanka¯r’s edition of the Yaco¯taraka¯viyam (Chakravarti 1974, p. 90), S. Pavanantam Pil:l:ai’s edition of the Ya¯pparunkalavirutti_ (Chakravarti 1974, p. 128), Sivan Pil:l:ai’s edition of the Pinkal_ :anikan: t:u (Chakravarti 1974, p. 134), the edition of the Tirunu¯:r:ranta¯ti (Chakravarti 1974, p. 135), but also his own work on the Nı¯lake¯cı¯ and the Me¯rumantirapura¯n: am (Chakravarti 1974, pp. 103,126). 123 636 C. Emmrich considered an academic text, as they were conceived in the 1970s, by adding bibliographical references to the works cited in the text. And second, he increases its scope by adding material such as references to works not yet published at the time of the first edition, as well as by adding an appendix entitled ‘‘Jaina Epigraphs in Tamil,’’ (Chakravarti 1974, pp. 140–205).67 This includes an annotated transliter- ation, translation and description of 85 inscriptions that had been published individually elsewhere, but are collected here for the first time. The most obvious characteristic of Ramesh’s reworking is that while augmenting the text, he leaves the core text unchanged. The appendix is appended, and the footnotes, which are entirely Ramesh’s, are divided from the main text by a line. This makes all the sutures of his work distinctly visible in the layout. More than that, nowhere does Ramesh allow his auctorial voice to emerge explicitly, which means that nearly none of the footnotes question statements made in the main text, nor do they relativize, contradict, complicate, or develop on the text. Other than servicing the main text, the notes remain, for the most part, indifferent towards it. The same can be said about the appendix, which remains oddly aloof, as the main text hardly mentions epigraphic evidence at all, other than when discussing the earliest evidence for the presence of Jains in South India (Chakravarti 1974, p. 12). In contrast, for the epigraphist Ramesh, it is not possible for an account of ‘‘the antiquity and popularity of Jainism in the Tamil: country,’’ and more than that, of its ‘‘contributions to the growth of Tamil language and literature’’ to do without reference to inscriptional sources, which ‘‘contain many words and expressions of lexical interest’’ (Chakravarti 1974, p. xix). For Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r, obviously, epigraphy, even when indicating a Jain donor, does not qualify as Jain literature.68 However, the encouragement Ramesh received from A.N. Upadhye to make Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s text ‘‘useful as a source book,’’ mentioned above, reflects, or betrays, a

67 Despite the later more comprehensive epigraphical publication by Ekambaranathan and Sivaprakasam (1987), Ramesh’s contribution remains highly valuable as it includes the transcribed texts of the inscriptions he lists. 68 That inscriptions do not play a role in the curricula of contemporary Jain communities may only be one reason. In spite of the developments initiated by Col. Colin Mackenzie’s Madras School of Orien- talism through the documentation and study of epigraphy, and its foundational importance for the historical study of South India (Trautmann 1999; Trautmann 2006; Wagoner 2003, pp. 788–791, 804–809), one should be careful not to exaggerate the power epigraphic evidence held for early twentieth century textual scholars such as Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r. For such scholars, inscriptions helped produce broad chronological grids that could be referred to by the philologist or historian of philosophy. However, only in very rare cases can specific texts be located within these grids, and thus philologists prefer in most cases to develop relative chronologies inter-textually. Furthermore, the specific training and career of an epigraphist with a pronounced interest, say in archaeology or history, was (and usually still is) quite distinct from that of someone dealing with, say, Jain doctrinal literature. The one type of specialist usually must rely on the expertise of the other when accessing unfamiliar sources, or making claims across their disciplinary horizons. Although he occasionally does make use of epigraphy (e.g. Chakravarti 1994, pp. 253–261, where he discusses the work of Hoernle and Hultzsch), dramatic proof of the fact that Cak- ravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r did not read all inscriptions with same critical awareness is the example in Jaina Literature in Tamil, where Ramesh’s footnote apodictically contradicts the literary historian, pointing out that that Kha¯rave¯la’s Ha¯thigumpha¯ inscription, contrary to Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s claims, does not, among other things, refer to the Pa¯n: t:iya king as being a Jain (Chakravarti 1974, p. 12, n. 1–4). 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 637 documentary intention of the epigraphist. In the original work, the author positions himself through and vis-a` -vis the literature of his own community. With regard to his historical agency, the work affirms itself as a political act, a ‘‘source’’ or ‘‘documentation’’ moving the Jains back on stage. The 1974 edition manages to turn the work into something that seems to suggest, in its seemingly disinterested documentation, that Jainism is ‘‘old’’, ‘‘popular’’ and ‘‘contributing’’, and that the political does not exist. And yet, its publication in the same Jain publishing house and, more crucially, the fact that this version would not have been possible without the support of Upadhye, the doyen of Indian Jain Studies and the person who compiled the index to the 1941 edition, shows that somehow it remained a Jain project, though maybe one less localized in that particular in-between space occupied by Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r, who straddled traditional Jain learning and the colonial academic world. To the urban, modern academic, particularly the non-Tamil Indian or Western academic reader, Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s work, with Ramesh’s annotation changing little if anything, may have, and may still, come across as highly selective, if not to say sectarian, manner of narrating a literary history. This is due to the conspicuous lack of cross-references to non-Jaina works and authors, or even to South Indian Jaina works in Pra¯krit and Sanskrit. This makes Jaina literature in Tamil appear remarkably consistent and homogenous, as well as conspicuously introspective and closed, pure and limited, artificially cut off by the presumed agenda of the author to essentialize the Jain in Tamil literature. Yet, again, the opposite seems to be true if one reads the work, not as an account of what actually happened to Jain literature in the period of its imagined dominance or following its vicissitudes through its longue durée, but as documentation of its discovery and translation. Therein lies the unobtrusive accomplishment, scholarly richness and, if it needs to be demonstrated, non-sectarianness of this work, a documentation presented by a Jain of a discovery that had been carried out mostly by non-Jain scholars. Here, the projected image of Tamil Jainism as a self-contained, hidden and hiding, mimetic yet hermetic parallel universe, reflected in the traditional curricular groupings of texts transposed into a modern literary history, shifts and becomes the image of a literary world. For Jains, still with their traditional background but already trained in academic institutions, this world not only emerges confidently from the shadows, it is imparted a value, is illuminated and reinvigorated by those very forces that were thought to be the cause of the ambivalent status of Tamil Jainism, a status between presence, absence and dissolution. What this meant for the community Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r moved in himself can probably best be determined by comparing his work to the 1926 publication The Jaina Law by Champat Rai Jain (1867–1942; Jain 1926; cf. Flu¨gel 2007, p. 9). Champat Rai Jain was a Digambara, Delhi-born lawyer and a generation older than our author. The Jaina Law, published in Madras, was an edition and translation of Digambara Jain legal texts from Sanskrit into English. It was meant as a powerful tool to end the common legal practice of dealing with Jains following the Hindu codes of law and the resistance of traditional Jain scholars, who refused to have their manuscripts or texts used and thus misused in colonial courts. In Champat Rai Jain’s case, modern academic Jain scholarship was used to break both old hegemonies. A generation later, modern Jain scholarship has discovered that its 123 638 C. Emmrich manuscripts and texts, if not those in Sanskrit, then those in Tamil, have long been part of newly emerging hegemonies, and that they might have the chance to be involved.69 Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r views his Jaina Literature in Tamil, as stated in its concluding paragraphs, as a ‘‘cursory survey of Tamil literature with special reference to Jaina contributions thereto’’ (Chakravarti 1974, p. 136) and, as he writes in the opening lines of his study, as a ‘‘casual perusal of Tamil literature,’’ a ‘‘casual perusal’’ which ‘‘will reveal the fact that, from earliest times, it, [i.e. Tamil literature] was influenced by Jaina culture and religion’’ (Chakravarti 1974, p. 1). The last two pages, which serve as a conclusion with no real connection to the preceding sections, are again, just as in the opening passages, revealing with regard to Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s larger agenda. They deal, in a rather oblique and summary fashion, with the conversion of Jains to Hinduism but who ‘‘zealously preserved their customs and manners acquired while they were Jainas’’ (Chakravarti 1974, p. 136). The author refers to the use of the word saivam in Tamil, mentioned above, as an example for the high ethical standards of Tamil Brahmans in comparison to the meat-eating and goat-sacrificing Brahmans of North and Northeastern India. It is also an example for the obvious influence Jainism must have had on the higher Tamil ‘‘classes’’, as Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r calls them, typical of his consistent avoidance of caste discourse. ‘‘Of course,’’ he writes, ‘‘there are scattered places where animal sacrifice is offered to Village Gods. But it must be said to the credit of the upper classes among the Tamil Hindus that they have nothing to do with this grosser form of Ka¯lı¯ worship.’’70 He ends with the hope that ‘‘with the growth of education and culture [...] even these lower orders in Tamil society will give up this gross and ignorant form of religious worship and elevate themselves to a higher religious status actuated by purer and nobler ideals’’ (Chakravarti 1974, p. 137). This last statement is seems to refer back to the opening paragraphs of the book dealing with ahim: sa¯ and the Vedic and North Indian origins of Jainism, particularly in the complete absence of references to literature or literary history. Rather, in addition to presenting Jainism as focussed on ahim: sa¯, what emerges here even more clearly is Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s concern about relating Tamil and North Indian Jainism, the South with the North. His formulation ‘‘[b]ut it must be said to the credit of the upper classes among the Tamil Hindus’’ sounds like it is addressing a North Indian audience, not one that is Tamil Jain, Tamil Hindu or something else. It sounds like it is addressing a North Indian audience for whom the cliche´d depravities of Northeast Indian ritual practices are the epitome of Brahmanism at its best (or worst). It is an audience who needs to be told that there are Brahmans, or

69 What all this may have meant, and may still mean, for those Jain communities that still rely on monastic training is hard to say. Anecdotally, I may add that the ritual of pura¯n: a-prasńa (‘‘questions [involving the use] of the [S´rı¯]pura¯n: a,’’ or in Tamil, literally, ‘‘Put-the-Thread-and-See’’ nu¯lpo¯t:t:u pa¯rkaratu), consulting the S´rı¯pura¯n: am for divinatory purposes (cf. Swaminathaiyer 1980, p. 58), is done today, as I have witnessed in the Tamil Jain household where I have done field research, on the basis of V. Ve¯nkat_ :ara¯culu Reddiar’s 1943 edition. 70 Chakravarti (1974, p. 137) demonstrates an obvious transfer from the realm of literature, such as the narratives found in the Yaco¯taraka¯viyam and the Nı¯lake¯cı¯, at the centre of which stand offerings to Ka¯lı¯, onto perceived popular practices. 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 639 rather, to avoid a religious/sectarian/polemic tone, members of the ‘‘upper classes among the Tamil Hindus,’’ which may or may not be a collective for Brahmins and high-cast non-Brahmins, who are ‘‘purer and nobler.’’ Groups that are not that different from what North Indian ahim: sa¯ circles have been preaching, because— and this would be the message testified by the literary evidence in the volume— they actually and unknowingly are and have always been Jains. Or to put it more carefully, that the Jains have shaped at least certain sections of Tamil society, culture and religion so strongly that their a¯ca¯ra is upheld even by those who proclaim to be non-Jains. This statement tries to do at least three things. First, it expresses an awareness of the fact that the Jaina cause is a single one, be it North or South, that the North and South are connected on the basis of Jain histories, values and agendas, and that scholars from the South are part of the larger, more active, more prosperous, and more successful Jain community in the North.71 It is indic- ative for the ecumenical thrust of Jain modernism that the divisive sectarian opposition S´veta¯mbara/Digambara never occurs. The former term is not mentioned 72 and the latter is usually replaced with Dra¯vid:aSanga._ Secondly, it claims that the situation in the South has been different and, if one reads it as suggested by the author, better than in the North and, explicitly, better than in the Northeast. Indeed, it might even be implicitly better than anywhere else in India where Jains are struggling to promote ahim: sa¯ against the resistance of the ‘‘upper class of Hindus,’’ because in the South, supposedly, there is no such resistance and Jainism, except by name and in some benighted rural pockets, already rules. Here, the outsider, who may be facing a skeptical North Indian audience wondering whether there are any Jains in the South at all, presents himself as speaking from a position of strength. He comes from an (almost) utopian place where, in terms of ahim: sa¯, (almost) everything is good. And his contribution to the North Indian Jain discourses may be particularly valuable, since he offers a model of how things could be or could become in the North. At the same time, he also is able to keep a distance and not become too involved in Northern agendas, as everything is somewhat different

71 To this, from the Tamil perspective, one might count the rich and powerful Ma¯rva¯ri S´veta¯mbara community thriving in Madras since the mid-eighteenth century, which, other than playing the kinship role of wife takers, has had little interaction with the economically much weaker Digambara community (e.g. Joseph 1997, p. 128). 72 This universalizing tendency is also characteristic of the stance Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r takes in his philosophical works. If ahim: sa¯ can serve to bring together all Jains, an inquiry into the nature of the self may prove Indian philosophy to be just as philosophical as its European counterpart. His introduction to the Samayasa¯ra, which discusses the self from the viewpoint of the Greeks to that of German Idealism, and then from the Upanis:ads to Sánkara,_ before dealing with the Jains (leaving out the Buddhists), opens with the words: ‘‘Man’s development in all aspects may be described as an attempt to discover himself. Whether we take the development of thought in the East or the West, the same principle ‘Know thyself’ seems to be the underlying urge’’ (Chakravartinayanar 1920, p. 1). Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r developed these thoughts further in the ‘‘Principal Miller Lectures,’’ which he gave in 1937 and were published as ‘‘Humanism and Indian Thought’’ (Chakravarti 1974, p. xxi). 123 640 C. Emmrich where he comes from.73 It should also be noted, for the sake of precision, that the author never talks about Jainism in Karnataka, for example, and that hence, for him the South is Tamil Nadu, as defined by the language of its literature.74 Finally, in a less apologetic way, he may be trying to articulate for himself, and to a certain degree for his audience back home, the problem of how to talk about the processes of absence, presence and dissolution, the forgetting, ignoring and rediscovering, but also of living in the sometimes parallel, sometimes integrated, but always connected literary communities of the mid-twentieth century Tamil Nadu. Formulated more pointedly: what he decides not to talk about, and this is connected to his agenda of portraying the Tamil situation as somewhat ideal, are the low-intensity conflicts of attrition and the strategies of avoidance or historiographies of persecution, which also mark the relationship of Jain, Sáiva and Vais:n: ava temple communities, particularly in religious centers such as Ka¯n˜cı¯puram or more rural settlements at large.75 On the one hand, these hardly perceptible yet ubiquitous movements may not lend themselves to be formulated in terms of ahim: sa¯ activism, since they usually manifest themselves in the ritual arena or in the narration of family histories, and thus Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r may not actually have had an available idiom to identify them as such. On the other hand, as a public figure in the Madras academic scene, he would have been both a member of the upper classes he refers to, or perhaps, more accurately, the ‘‘classes’’ of academic institutions, than the ‘‘castes’’ of that which, in his times, had already become an matter of powerful political dispute. It is also, of course, in this landscape of more and more heavily entrenched parties, mirrored in the debates about literary history–European versus Indian, non-Brahmans versus Brahmans, Sanskrit versus Tamil, modernists versus traditionalists, regionalists versus the nation state, and the Sáivas versus everyone else—that Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r may have struggled, failed or simply refused to take sides on the basis of whatever agenda he may or may not have had. The role of caste among the

73 This does not seem to be the place for Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r to mention the work of T: i.Es Tarmapantu S´rı¯pa¯l (1900–1980), the popular and still today highly revered Tamil activist against temple sacrifice, author of plays such as Paliyin-- kot:umai (‘‘The Cruelty of [Animal] Sacrifice’’), and volumes of poetry such as Jı¯vaka¯run:ya kı¯tankal_ : (‘‘Songs of Compassion toward the Living’’). In his early forties, when Jaina Literature in Tamil was published, he had begun to make an impact as a Jain writer and reformer. 74 The view that the South is, first, reduced to ‘‘the Tamil country,’’ and that it is the South understood this way that is perceived not only as a beneficiary, but also, historically, a major factor in the forming of ‘‘India’’ as a whole, is a view that would have been familiar to Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r. It is possible that, to a certain degree, he internalized and endorsed it. Indeed, and as we have seen in the role of the Jains as educators, poets and scientists, he would not be the only one to have extended that causal connection further back, to the perceived ‘‘contribution’’ made by the Jains. In his notes to Chitty’s Tamil Plutarch, T.P. Mı¯n-- a¯t:cicuntaram writes in his comments with regard to Simon Casie Chitty: ‘‘Ever since Chan- dragupta Maurya and his Jain teacher came and settled in Sravana Belgola, the south that is the Tamil country, rather than the disturbed north, became the cradle of Indian culture. That is how great Tamilians began to make their great contributions to Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism and how Tamil became the vehicle of Indian culture’’ (Chitty 1982, p. 118). 75 Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s position stands in contrast to the recent publication by Sekhar, who ends his survey of Jain literature in Tamil with the lament: ‘‘Religious traditions have also failed to realize that life is enhanced not merely by intellectual warfare or muscle power, as is evident in contemporary times, but by humane, healthy relationships among them. Had these traditions understood this fundamental ideal about life and living, Tamil language and literature would have been further enriched.’’ He sees his contribution as a reminder ‘‘to learn our lessons from a past, wounded history’’ (Sekhar 2009, p. 86). 123 Jains in Tamil Literary Histories 641

Digambara Jains of the Tamil-speaking region is little explored, the correspondence and relationship with Sáiva and Vais:n: ava castes and their members even less so. It is well known that their range and scale show many parallels (e.g. Sangave 1980, pp. 310, 341–342; Jaini 1979, p. 195), and that these models must be carefully historicized in the light of conversion narratives (e.g. Sangave 1980, p. 310). Life- cycle rituals centering on thread-wearing and temple service, as restricted to certain Jain castes, suggest a stronger orientation towards models such as the status of the twice-born and the Brahman ritual specialist. At the same time, it is agricultural castes from which monastic communities are recruited and which constitute most of the Tamil Digambara Jains. Thus, Tamil Jains have traits of the Sáiva and Vais:n: ava Pira¯man: ars (or Brahmans), of the high-caste non-brahman Ve¯:l:la¯:lars, and even of the Cet::tiya¯rs, conventionally seen as holding the status of Van: ikar or trader. Hence, they cover all three dominating castes, if differentiated by their specific regional locales (see Schalk & A¯ :lva¯ppil::lai Ve¯luppil::lai 2002, p. 167). Complicating the picture, the Dravidian movement has historically developed and based its nationalist agenda on the Jains, be it their language76 or religion.77 To conclude, in order to better understand which readers back home Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r was writing for, we should be aware of the fact that, disregarding the North Indian Jain audience, the Ma¯rva¯ri S´veta¯mbara community of Madras, and the learned non-Jain audience in Tamil Nadu, the Digambara Tamil Jain audience, those Tamil Jains who would have both been acquainted with the type of literature he was writing about and had access to academic publications in English, would have been very small. Most Tamil Digambara Jains lived, and still live today, in rural areas. While often connected in terms of ritual practice and education to local or regional centers of traditional Jain learning (Joseph 1997, pp. 132–134), they had little formal education and little if no access to academic writing. Indeed, if Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s work had any major impact at home, it would have been on the non-Jaina Tamil academic world. This is where statements about Tamil Jaina

76 Although Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s work emphasizes the Tamil in Jain literature, he makes sure not to refer to the vast amount of literature in Sanskrit and only to some Man: iprava¯l:am literature produced by the Digambaras in South India. In spite of the fact that there is a recent tendency among the Tamil Jain community to claim Pra¯krit as a middle ground between the politico-linguistic camps of Tamil and Sanskrit, indeed, if there is a literary language, other than Tamil and Sanskrit, of the Tamil Digambara Jains that has a continuity of scholarly and ritual tradition reaching up to the present, it is Jain Man: iprava¯l:am and not Kundakunda’s Jain Sáurasenı¯. I am thankful to John Cort for his observation that the role Pra¯krit has played in the last 500 years in South India still remains to be assessed: The life of the tradition has depended for centuries on the Sanskritic commentaries. As Cort has remarked to me, it remains to be tested how competent Tamil or even Kannadiga Jain scholars might have been in Pra¯krit, and what role it would have played in curricula prior to the nineteenth century emergence of Pra¯krit philology. 77 Internal Jain identity politics would again prove ambivalent with regard to the endorsement of Bud- dhism by activist figures like A¯ yo¯tı¯ta¯s (1845–1914) and Buddhism’s ideological role in dalit movements. While the debates within the Jain community fuelled by the academic study of Jainism in India and Europe since the nineteenth century, would articulate the historical and ideological differences of the Jain tradition regarding Buddhism, they were dealing with a historical entity that allowed the Jains to sharpen their profile as pertaining to a distinct tradition without having to reckon, at least until the dalit endorsement of Buddhism, with real political powers. Later, the differences regarding Buddhism were toned down in favor of shared, yet different views on ahim: sa¯, nevertheless stopping short of joining into a potentially shared antagonistic relationship towards Brahmanism. 123 642 C. Emmrich literature generally pointed out not only ‘‘[t]he prevalence of Jainism in ancient Tamil land,’’ but even more, ‘‘its usefulness to the Tamil people’’ (Chakravarti 1974, p. 136), as well as the specific usefulness of the texts being discussed for studying Tamil literature.78 For that public, his ‘‘history of literature,’’ and the ‘‘literary history’’ that can be read between the lines, would have worked less as an appeal to modernist Jaina ethics on a Pan-Indian scale, but rather, would have been very similar to Pu¯rn: alinkam_ Pil::lai’s Primer in Tamil Literature. It functions as a didactic survey looking at some of the same material, in the same formal ways, that readers had become acquainted with through Pu¯rn: alinkam Pil::lai’s Primer, albeit from an unfamiliar perspective. It was a perspective that would help readers not only see what was all too well known, but also help them imagine that there might be other worlds and other stories hidden by the familiar and within it, stories from the past but also amongst us that are yet to be discovered and still to be told. U.Ve¯. Ca¯mina¯taiyar’s story of the discovery of Tamil literature through Jain sources, echoed in Cutler’s moment in Tamil literary history, reconnected a scholar’s life- time achievement, and his role in a larger cultural movement, to an imagined encounter with a past yet to be appropriated. It was a past that had lain unnoticed in the dispersed Jain settlements of the Tamil-speaking region.79 In relation to this, what Appaca¯mi Cakravarti Na¯yan-- a¯r’s work expresses is an acknowledgement of that achievement. He has become part of a larger whole, mobilized by agendas that are not his own but that constantly affect him. They are agendas he can endorse or from which he can withdraw. They demand a redefinition of where he positions himself, on the fringes but within and sometimes at the very center. It is, however, a center that can never be his own. He acknowledges being in and out at the same time, and that there is a possibly unfulfillable promise in the many texts still to be read.

Acknowledgments This article developed out of a manuscript that was ﬁrst presented on 26 March 2010 as that year’s Roop Lal Jain Endowed Lecture at the Centre for South Asian Studies of the University of Toronto. My thanks go to the family of Roop Lal Jain for giving me that opportunity, to Chelva Kanaganayakam for inviting me, and to my audience at that time for their attention, their patience and their questions. I would also like to thank John Cort, Anne Monius, Cynthia Peck-Kubaczek, Sanjay Subrahmaniam and Takanobu Takahashi for helping me improve this study. And most of all, I would like to thank Srilata Raman for her constant advice, crucial comments and our shared ongoing conversation.

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